How to delete your iCloud account and Apple ID

First, invent a time machine.

Second, go back in time and force Apple to add account removal.

For now - you can’t.

You can remove your Google account. You can remove your Facebook account. You can’t remove your iCloud account and your Apple ID. They are eternal.

I’ve run into this little oddness before, but I was reminded of it when cleaning up my deceased father’s online presence.

A 2013 Apple forum post says: “Access can be stopped by Apple if they are provided with your Death Certificate.” I bet you have to fly the certificate to Cupertino. Even then it’s not clear if any data is deleted. I wonder if anyone has ever done this.

Apple gets away with a lot.

PS. I did set his email to forward to me.

OS X (macOS) installer sizes - Mountain Lion through Sierra

Sierra is almost ready for release now, so I’m preparing to install.

Interesting to compare installer sizes from the download era:

Release	Size (GB
Mountain Lion	4.46
Mavericks	5.33
Yosemite	5.68
El Capitan	6.21
Sierra	4.97

Sierra isn’t much bigger than Mountain Lion.

Curious.

Apple drives me into Google's arms - using Google Photos with iPhone and Aperture

Apple has broken me. I’ve left iCloud Photo Stream shares for Google Photos.

First I lost the ability to share from Aperture to Facebook. I think that was probably a Facebook change, but of course Aperture isn’t getting updates any more.

That was annoying.

Losing Apple Photo Stream was much worse. Photo stream wasn’t great, but it was simple for my daughter, sister, and other users to subscribe to. For a time I could use iCloud Photo Library on Photos.app alongside iCloud Photo Streams on Aperture [1].

Then Aperture retched and I lost my shared photo streams (but not, happily, the originals). I played around with restoring iLifeAssetManagement from backup but, despite early promise, I couldn’t defeat Apple’s black box sync infrastructure [2].

That’s it. I’m toast. I surrender. Google’s inexplicable aversion to album creation on upload is the lesser evil now.

I’ve installed Google Photos on my iPhone and enabled backup and sync. I’ll use that to cull and play with photos before I transfer them to Aperture.

I’ve freed up 14GB from my Air’s SSD by deleting iLifeAssetManagement and I’ve installed Google Photos Uploader.app. I pointed that to a folder on an external drive, when I want to share from Aperture I export there for upload. I do my post-upload organization and sharing through the web UI.

Since Google nicely migrated images when it closed Picasa Web Albums my new shares are reunited with my old Picasa web albums. I’ve come home again. Though I’m still puzzled by Google’s weird album aversion.

It’s far from ideal, but Apple has burned me yet again. They seem to despise my data.

[1] Though I gave up on iCloud Photo Library when I realized it was more or less incompatible with importing images from iPhone photo roll to Aperture.

[2] Apple is famous for sync that disallows any kind of troubleshooting.

iLifeAssetManagement

Partial restoration of lost Apple iCloud photo stream shared albums (updated: didn't work)

Something went wrong. It always does.

I had thousands of images distributed across over 60 shared photo streams. One day I rebuilt Aperture’s database and all the iCloud images were in one recovery folder. I deleted them and then most of my iCloud shared albums vanished.

This is a quick summary of how I recovered most of them from backups. I don’t know how this truly works, but it seems that this folder in my user account was a source of truth for iCloud photo streams:

/Users/[my user name]/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement

I copied what was there to an external drive then deleted it, logged out (necessary to close open databases) then logged in. With Wifi on when I launched Aperture it showed no images at first then downloaded what was in iCloud. So there was some kind of sync.

Next I did the same thing (closed Aperture, deleted, etc) but this time copied a backup of iLifeAssetManagement from prior to the bad event. I then turned off wifi.

On relaunch Aperture showed about 6100 images in “Shared:iCloud”. It rebuilt thumbnails for them. Then I turned on Wifi. Next I saw the count rise briefly as albums I’d shared previously came down from iCloud. Alas, the count started falling again, stabilizing at 5600.

I had most of my streams back — though one stream was much smaller than it used to be. Still, about 80% recovery and I didn’t lose a few I’d done post-disaster.

Better than nothing.

Sync without controls is truly hell (and Apple never provides enough control).

Update: Aperture shows 56 single owner photo streams (one is empty) and 5 shared. iOS Photos.app shows 20. At least one of the iCloud albums not seen in iOS photos.app cannot be found at its public link. The iCloud library and the Aperture iCloud library are not in sync. So I’d call this a failure.

MarsEdit tables: create in TextEdit and paste

MarsEdit is a great app — but I wish it were a rental product. Then I’d pay every year and Daniel Jalkut would be incented to add support for image resizing and table editing.

In the meantime I’ve discovered I can get good results by creating a table in TextEdit then pasting it into MarsEdit rich text editor.

iTunes purchased movies showing only a handful of my purchased movies

iTunes on my Mac shows 138 movies of which 135 have purchase dates. Those 135 were purchases from Apple starting in March 2009.

If I visit those 135 in iTunes some allow me to download, some invite me to purchase again. One old SD movie allowed me to download and that worked on my iPad and showed in the Purchased list after download.

My iPhone seems to show about the same number (though it doesn’t count for me).

My new iPad shows only 24 movies as purchased. Both devices have the same iTunes account. When I view my devices in iTunes (we’re at the 10 device limit) both my iPad and iPhone show up under the same Apple Store Apple ID.

One possibility is that the purchased list on my iPad is only showing HD movies. I can’t tell from iTunes which are HD and which are SD; we almost always buy SD when it is available. Some 3+ GB files are probably HD and they don’t show up.

Something is broken in Apple DRM land. I have a private message into Apple Twitter support and an Apple Discussion post …

Update: The “something that is broken” thing is the user interface. Apple Twitter support pointed me in the right direction.

When I view Movies in TV.app on my iPad there’s a subtle top left drop down called “Library” that on tap shows a hidden filter that defaults to Recently Added.

When I change that to Movies I see them all.

I was fooled by the "See All" link to the right of "Purchased Movies" that displays when the hidden Recently Added filter is active. The “Purchased Movies” heading should really be “Recently Purchased Movies” when viewed in this mode. It shows 4 recently purchased movies, and “See All” shows all recently purchased movies.

How to upload images to a specific album in Google Photos

How to upload images to a specific album in Google Photos:

1. Create the album. You have to choose an existing photo to create it.
2. Drag and drop the photos you want to upload onto the album you’ve created.

Despite years of customer requests you still can’t select a folder and upload it into an album.

I’ve read that if you work with full res (not reduced) images in Google Drive you can organize them in folders and turn those folders into albums in Google Photos. These count against storage costs. I have not tested this.