It’s very, very common for people complaining about something to assume that everyone is affected, without looking into whether there’s something specific to their machine/software load causing the problem. “This is the worst software that Apple has ever produced!” “Works fine for me” “You’re just a shill for Apple!” (And substitute any number of companies for Apple.)
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Yes, there is that possibility that only I was affected. It happened to me. One page on a pharmacy website kept coming up access denied. What was going on?
Well, it turned out that the Catalina beta broke my ExpressVPN software. Manual config got around that. Later versions of Catalina broke my manual config, but by then, Express VPN had developed compatible versions of their software. So yes, there were changes in Catalina that broke ExpressVPN. Were they design changes or bugs? Don’t know.
ExpreesVPN knows as they fixed their software to work with whatever Apple presented. And in this case, I never once criticized anyone but myself privately for not checking via ipleak.net if the VPN was actually working or just connecting and leaking IP and DNS. This kind of stuff is normal in the development process.
But when you start up in Safe Mode, that eliminates most of the third party load issues by making my MacBook as vanilla and basic as possible. If the problem is still present in Safe Mode, it’s a reasonable assumption that I might have bad software.
Then there is the matter of the software vendor making it difficult to troubleshoot because the software vendor hasn’t built in any ways for a user (who cannot read machine language logs) to see what the software is doing. Apple Photos for Mac is a prime example. What is the software doing when the only thing on the screen is “updating”? For days at a time.
There is also Apple’s secrecy. It is very hard to determine if other users are having similar experiences. That is what makes sites like this so necessary. Does Apple ever tell a user if they found the bug or fixed it? Ever seen a change log? Blog post? Nope, it is all a big secret.
On some level, Apple has an institutional belief that their software is better than it is. Mozilla gives users access to Bugzilla so we can see if our bug is confirmed. Apple has Communities, a forum in which Apple employees do not participate, so it is often a situation of the “blind leading the blind”.
Then we have a situation of something that used to work perfectly, that something has not been changed in any way and now no longer works. The only difference is Catalina has replaced Mojave.
Download Manager S3 add-on no longer works in Firefox but works in Chrome. We know that Catalina killed all Mozilla products with an admitted bug in Beta 5. Beta 6 returned Mozilla functionality. Meanwhile Chrome continued to work. It was my browser for two weeks while waiting for beta 6.
So that tells me an add-on can fail in Firefox and work fine in Chrome. Where’s the bug? Well, either in Catalina or in Firefox or in the add-on. Apple is the 800 pound gorilla, Mozilla is the 200 pound gorilla. The developer of Download Manager S3 which is donationware is the chimp.
Unless he can show Apple through the developer program that something they did broke his add-on when it restored Mozilla, he has to make the changes to make his add-on work again. Now, if the developer worked on Download Manager S3 four years ago and lives in Russia, getting him to get interested in a 4 year old piece of software might prove a bit of a challenge. So far he has remained silent.
So no one is saying Catalina is the worst piece of software ever. It is complex and it is more buggy than it should be for a public beta.
One reason is that Apple often pulls the rug out from underneath developers, who donn’t even start trying to get their software compatible until much closer to release. In other words, if they fix it at beta 2, beta 8 might break it again. So they wait for beta 8.
In the case of Photos Mac, I have spent a year off and on working with senior advisors at Apple in the digital media group. I have submitted log dumps and software traces. The engineers will not tell the senior advisors what they found, if anything.
So after a year, I don’t even know if Apple internally recognizes the failure to sync as a real bug or not. I could accept that one of my 22,000 photos is corrupt. But which one?
Apple admits that in the change to Photos from iPhotos, there was an iCloud bug that rotated half my photos. The fix wasn’t to rotate them back but to revert all edits. Then rotate if needed.
I do know that the iOS version of Photos works extremely well. iCloud photos works but is feature limited. Like I cannot download my entire library via export. But Photos Mac has never worked properly since Mojave.
I have learned from other users that what updating photos does to initially synch the local library and iCloud is insanely slow and can take days or weeks to complete. As a user, Apple gives me no clue if the process is working or the app is hung.
And the Senior Advisors say that I will not get any downloaded photos until updating completes. Which to my way of thinking is simply backwards. If I am launching Photos, I clearly want to work on my most recent photos first. Sync those, then work on validating the rest of the library.
It is not designed that way and for that alone I think I have a very valid criticism of the quality of Apple’s engineering on Photos Mac.
For anyone reading this, can you confirm if you have a syncing problem with large photo libraries?
So let me get this straight: you’re using beta software, ran into a bad interaction between it and a third party VPN, and you think the thing to do is to complain about it here? No one who cares about stability should be using Catalina, as you can see if you read your own words. You have problems with Catalina, so why are you even using it? I have it (or iOS 13) nowhere.
First thing to try, if you’re having connectivity problems, is to turn software that might interfere (VPN, port sniffers, firewalls) off if you can.
And yes, about six months ago I decided to finally break down and put all of my photos into the Cloud. It took weeks, wasn’t helped by the fact that most of my photos are on my MacPro running Sierra (upgrade to High Sierra failed, didn’t try again because the machine is too important right now, won’t try with Catalina) and that we have Comcast (frequent few minute outages). It sent the metadata right away, so I could see all of my albums on my iPhone right away, and then watched as they slowly filled in, so I knew more or less what it was doing. Now, of course, everything has been uploaded, and it all works swimmingly. Any photos taken on my iPhone almost immediately show up everywhere else, including the MacPro (although it complains about the format it doesn’t support).
I don’t use Apple’s forums. I used to use Garmin’s forums; same problem, Garmin wasn’t there for the most part.
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Need to do a bit of marketing to the younger folk as they obviously don’t realise on what they are missing. K
To be accurate, Tim Cook is not an accountant. He’s an engineer and operations guy. He has a BS in Industrial Engineering from Auburn University and an MBA from Duke. He served as the director of North American fulfillment for IBM (while getting his MBA), the COO of the computer reseller division of Intelligent Electronics, and then the Vice President for Corporate Materials at Compaq before Steve Jobs hired him as Senior Vice President for Worldwide Operations and later made him CEO after having him take over temporarily twice.
So if you don’t like Cook, take it up with Jobs. :-)
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Yes, you are correct. Creating an empty library worked in the past. As soon as I enabled iCloud photos, it started downloading. Placeholders, then thumbnails, then camera originals. I was just taking some wild ass guess to see if I could kick start it under Catalina. I could not.
You also make my other point. Weeks or days for it to do what it does is INSANE. It is clearly bad engineering. Hire some engineers from Dropbox or EtreCheck.
And when you launch photos, what do you want first? The photos you took this morning or all 22,000 of your photos goling back ten years synced again every time you turn off and back on iCloud Photos when it is stuck doing nothing. Although you cannot be sure it is doing nothing, because Apple provide no ongoing verbose logging. Hey, I am old enough to remember modems and they gave verbose feedback so you could troubleshoot where the problem was happening in the log-in script.
Why does Apple insist on making software for dummies? Fine if they want to create a simple mode, with the option of a verbose mode. But they just remove every bit of information that can help an advanced user solve a prolblem.
BTW remember when Apple had defined Error Codes you could look up so you could maybe understand why the program threw the error in the first place? Well, according to AppleCare that database of error codes on Mac OS hasn’t been maintained for years. While Apple has no problem deprecating functions, error codes going back to the PowerPC are still in the database. Every programming team just willy-nilly adds new ones.
Maybe you should actually READ the post before making false assumptions. Because I didn’t complain about the VPN issue, I just troubleshot it, worked with ExpressVPN support, which is better than AppleCare, and we solved the problem. The only person I blamed was myself for not catching the clues and then verifying from an external site that the VPN was working. Connected and working are not the same thing.
You are running an out of date operating system. When I was running Sierra, Photos worked for me as it works for you. You are also a late adopter, a bit of a laggard when it comes to technology. OK, we’re all different and you are more conservative. That isn’t a criticism at all.
I am an early adopter with plenty of time to beta test. And because I’ve done it so much, I am pretty good at beating up software and making it fail and the documenting the steps required to make it fail. I was so good that when I lived in San Francisco, Google frequently called me in for usability testing in their labs in Mountain View. And paid me for my time.
I also was paid a few times by Intuit to be observed in usability studies on Quickbooks.
I signed up for the Catalina beta in the hope it fixed Photos. It didn’t. It made it worse. But my iPhone reliably uploads all my photos to iCloud. As I said, two thirds of the system works and one third doesn’t even come close.
High Sierra Upgrade bricked my 2012 Mac Book Pro. Apple sent me and others affected by an untested, buggy installer brand new 2017 MacBook Pros. Apple doesn’t give away expensive computers unless they know they screwed up. In my opinion, they screw up too often on things they should not have screwed up on. They never tested the High Sierra Upgrade on a 2012 MacBook Pro. A costly mistake wasting their money and my time. But I used my iPad for the two weeks it took for Apple to send me my brand new FREE computer.
So congratulations that Photos and iCloud work for you on Sierra. But I really want to hear from people on Mojave or Catalina about syncing of photo libraries. I wish Photos today worked as well as it did on Sierra. But sadly it doesn’t.
I can confirm that I have no technical problems syncing a 35,000 image library in Photos in any version of macOS since iCloud Photo Library debuted, including the current betas of Catalina and iOS 13. And that even includes having my local Photos library corrupted such that I couldn’t back it up and had to erase the library and download everything from iCloud. I’m syncing two Macs (Mojave and Catalina at the moment), an iPhone (iOS 12), and an iPad (iOS 13), and it works fine on all of them.
(There was a painful Catch-22 caused by it having to “re-upload” after turning iCloud off and back on, but everything was synced correctly once it was over. I haven’t had the time or energy to see if that’s been fixed or not.)
Same here. I used to visit Macintouch regularly, but with all of the complaining dominating many threads recently, I found the site a lot less interesting and useful. A few months ago, when Ric asked for help supporting the site, I came to the conclusion I’d just be spending money just to hear people whine, and I decided to move on.
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Only the MacPro runs Sierra. The other two (MacBook Pro, iMac) run Mojave and will be upgraded in a couple of weeks (or whenever Catalina is released). The MacPro is too important at the moment to mess with, so no upgrade there. If I replace it, since I gather the new MacPro is Ridiculously Expensive™, I’ll probably replace it with something running Linux.
Photos on the MacBook Pro also works just fine, but there were far fewer photos stored on it, so syncing them took little time. The MacPro had most of the ~26,000 photos and videos in my Library, now all in the Cloud (and on Amazon Photos since I have Prime). Everything now works, but the process of getting it that way was a pain.
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Yes, what you have described is how it is for public beta testers, but that’s quite different from the $99 Developer beta environment. They do have a forum to discuss similar experiences, they do get a change log that often describes new / fixed issues with workarounds when necessary, and they often receive replies and requests for more information from their problem / enhancement reports. Many of us have suggested to Apple that at least a Public Beta Forum would be tremendously useful at low cost to them, but so far they’ve ignored those suggestions. And if there’s even a hint of trying to do that on the Apple Support Forum, the host has been instructed to and will delete it immediately.
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Just a quick note that Apple would prefer that you first report such issues to them so that they can be sure it’s not an OS bug that they need to fix before the 3rd party developer wastes time trying to work around an Apple bug. They say they will contact the developer if they see it’s an issue the developer needs to fix to adjust to something new or completely deprecated with the OS and occasionally will even instruct the user to do so, but Apple hasn’t been very consistent with all of that.
I think it is important that Mac loyalists from way back, like fogcity and even myself, are occasionally permitted to vent their/our disappointment and frustration with “The New Apple” with specific examples. I too suffered for more than a year, along with many other users, through the poor choice a few years ago in change of system font, thin gray letters on white background etc., loss of color in distinguishing menubar icons, ending skeuomorphism and other terrible Apple changes that hit us at the same time. Headaches and eye fatigue plagued me throughout each day, and were so common that even my eye doctor, also a Mac user, remarked on the number of patients reporting this problem on their Macs during that year or more of misery.
As long as the complaints are specific and not general rants, a purpose is served. In some cases, it enables us emotionally to hang on until the bad decisions are ultimately replaced with good decisions. And forums which enable us to read similar problems experienced by others is at least a reassurance that we are not simply suffering from paranoia or total deterioration of our senses.
And even if Apple personnel never acknowledge it, I can’t believe that they never read posts on sites full of user wisdom like TidBITS Talk.
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Thanks for the support.
In my view, Apple is showing some early symptoms of a greater illness. In 3 years of more of the same from Apple management, there will be no advantage to buying Apple products and services.
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So this is the topic where I’m allowed to whine with impunity? :gleefully grabs keyboard:
;)
It’s where whining will end up for the time being since I’m trying to be nice, but I have no desire to run a site that attracts more of this crap. If I see that happening, I’ll start deleting posts and banning users wholesale.
When it comes to whining, I don’t think it’s funny, I don’t think it’s clever, I don’t think it’s effective, and the more I see, the less I think of those who post it.
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Sorry to hit a sore spot. I just thought I’d humorously warn you about what this topic could become. I have no intention of whining, and I like your solution. 
Please define whining.
If a contributor documents a situation Apple has created (not a bug but a design decision), questions the wisdom of that situation or offers an opinion on why there is perhaps something wrong , and then suggests a better way of doing it than Apple’s way, is that whining?
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It’s your site, Adam, but it’s more or less the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and declaiming “nah-nah-nah I can’t hear you”.
Honestly you have more fortitude and intellectual honestly. It stinks that Apple has betrayed us at a deep level and lives now simply to create revenue streams and milk them. Almost all of us here jumped on the Apple train, using and evangelising Apple products and software for Apple’s promise to make computing better and to improve our lives.
As each product line becomes more and more locked down and less and less open, as more and more critical bugs slip into core software, it is our and your role as those who knew the original brighter Apple to hold these bean counters to account.
We have the right to computers which can be repaired and upgraded. We have the right to an OS which does not lock us out of core functionality. We have the right to be able to install third party applications. All of those rights have either already been taken from us since the death of SJ in 2012 or Apple is in the process of taking them away from us now.
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This topic has certainly brought out more participation and comments from users than most of the other topics on the board. Isn’t that a good thing?
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