Apple iCloud Photos now compatible with Windows 11 Photos

This entire rollout has been confusing. I'm a Windows user that has been using iCloud on my PC for ages. My iCloud Photos have always shown in the Windows Photos app because iCloud conveniently drops an iCloud Photos link into the Pictures folder on Windows. So what exactly is this integration supposed to do? When I click on the newly added iCloud Photos link in the Photos app I get an "Oops! Please add iCloud to Folders. You need to add your iCloud Photos folder to the folders section to see your photos" notification. WTF?!

I hope Apple will come with a decent API for third-party integrations. For example, I would like to sync Apple Photos with my Synology. The problem is, Synology has no true access to Apple Photos in the sense that it can do calls to the back-end on my behalf. It needs an iOS app to scan for changes to Photos and then replicate those actions on Synology. This is not syncing, because when I remove something from Synology (or Apple Photos), this is not reflected on Synology. It is simply accumulating photos. 
This way, I will soon hit my 2TB space, and end up with a problem. I want to properly have my photos - with all metadata - backed up, so I can free up space on Photos.
Apple’s closed approach sucks.

MatrixMetering said:

This entire rollout has been confusing. I'm a Windows user that has been using iCloud on my PC for ages. My iCloud Photos have always shown in the Windows Photos app because iCloud conveniently drops an iCloud Photos link into the Pictures folder on Windows. So what exactly is this integration supposed to do? When I click on the newly added iCloud Photos link in the Photos app I get an "Oops! Please add iCloud to Folders. You need to add your iCloud Photos folder to the folders section to see your photos" notification. WTF?!

Me too. I’ve always been able to view my Apple Photos content on my Windows PCs. 

I’m a bit apprehensive when it comes to integrating any Apple or macOS content too closely with Windows. I don’t mind “wasting” storage space on my Windows machines by allowing Windows to store duplicates of content imported from my Apple account, like photos. However I get very nervous if Microsoft apps are able to delete content that’s natively managed on the Apple side by an Apple exclusive app. 

In other words, I’m okay with Microsoft’s photo app copying photos from iCloud but if I delete/modify them from the Windows photo app I don’t want to sync those changes back to iCloud. Yeah, this is a half baked level of integration but one that’s based on my needs and reluctance to allow Microsoft to change content that I see as being managed by Apple apps. 

I ran into an issue recently when I tried using Microsoft Outlook as my default mail client on both my Apple devices and Microsoft devices and allowing it to access my Apple Contacts. For reasons unknown to me I ended up with most of my Apple contacts obliterated on all of my machines, Mac and Windows.  Fortunately I had backups, but I’m still gun shy about allowing too much integration between the two worlds. 

To be clear, I do use Microsoft Office and allow it full access to Office documents that are stored on iCloud from either Mac or Windows. I have never experienced any issues with this setup and would be okay using OneDrive in the same capacity. 

The difference here is that these documents are managed by Office and it exists on both platforms. My issue with Contacts involved granting a Microsoft app access to content that’s managed by an Apple exclusive app. The sharing broke. If Microsoft or any other 3rd party had a Contacts app that ran on both platforms like Word and Excel do, I’d be okay with the same app on either platform having full access to the contacts content. To me, this isn’t a sharing relationship because ownership doesn’t cross app boundaries. 

CheeseFreeze said:

I hope Apple will come with a decent API for third-party integrations. For example, I would like to sync Apple Photos with my Synology. The problem is, Synology has no true access to Apple Photos in the sense that it can do calls to the back-end on my behalf. It needs an iOS app to scan for changes to Photos and then replicate those actions on Synology. This is not syncing, because when I remove something from Synology (or Apple Photos), this is not reflected on Synology. It is simply accumulating photos. 
This way, I will soon hit my 2TB space, and end up with a problem. I want to properly have my photos - with all metadata - backed up, so I can free up space on Photos.
Apple’s closed approach sucks.

I understand where you’re coming from when storage costs are concerned. From my previous post you can probably infer that I’m on the other side of the fence because I’m more concerned about accidental loss than duplication. Plus I’ve already sucked it up and went to the 2TB storage tier. But yeah, it’s a very legitimate concern and an overriding one for some folks. 

In fact, Apple isn’t totally closed, at least on the Mac platform. Apple does allow apps like Affinity to run plugins within Photos. Going down this path removes the ambiguity about which app owns the content and changes to the content. This results in two apps following my definition of sharing but Apple’s app completely encapsulates the plugin so it’s kind of a pseudo sharing arrangement.

Apple knows how to do APIs and Apple knows how to do sharing. But doing sharing across any boundaries and especially at the operating system level requires very clear transactional semantics that both sides must fully agree to. 

In my humble opinion these semantics should include at least optional journaling and rollback capabilities that limit the potential loss from unforeseen failure modes of the app specific content. To do this right either the storage side needs to have some contextual knowledge about the nature of the stored content or each app on both sides of the share boundary needs to have this knowledge. This is why I don’t have heartburn about apps like Word and Excel having full access from two different operating systems, because these apps have the contextual knowledge about the nature of the stored content regardless of the operating system they are running on. 

Rather than cough up for the 2TB tier (and why isn’t there a 1 TB tier, but I suspect that the answer is “gouging”), I’ve started deleting almost-duplicate photos from Apple Photos. Takes a lot longer but it’s very much cheaper.