Moving the family to 2TB of iCloud shared storage (Family Sharing)

We have five family members with 7 devices using iCloud storage. Four of us are paying $1/month for 50GB of storage, one is fine on the free 5GB. Mostly this suffices, but my daughter’s photos have been near the edge for a while [1]. Instead of updating her quota I decided to update the family to 2TB ($120 a year) and not have to worry about this for a while. First, of course, I confirmed that there was a way to unwind this decision.

I wondered how it would go since we all use a single iTunes account for purchasing DRMd material (video, movies, etc). We’ve done this long before family sharing was a feature and switching from to the new approach is a bit worrisome. (Family Sharing of DRMd material does have one advantage — whoever buys things gets to keep them when they separate from the family. As the kids tastes have diverged sharing is less useful.).

The iTunes account turned out not to matter. Family iCloud sharing runs off the family owner iCloud account, not the family owner’s iTunes account (Of course for most people these are, at least superficially, the same thing. I suspect they aren’t all that integrated in Apple’s famously messed up back end servers.)

I followed Apple’s support guide to update myself to 2TB. The guides aren’t that well done, they don’t make it obvious how the process works. I couldn’t enable the family sharing of my iCloud quota in Sierra (probably needs High Sierra), but it was easy to do on my iPad. Once that was enabled an iMessage went to family members for them to transition.

The experience for family members was a bit glitchy. For two members I could just tap on the iMessage, enter iCloud credentials and accept the switch. Users get a notice their current plan will end and they’ll receive a prorated reimbursement. The family member who was on the free quota didn’t need to opt in, he just go the expanded quota (an interesting security-convenience tradeoff). For the fifth family member I ran into several failed attempts on an iOS 10 device. I got as far as entering his credentials to access the upgrade but then the process failed. On his iOS 11 device I was able to make the switch from this iCloud manage storage settings. His iOS 10 device then also showed the correct settings.

Two TB is overkill. I might drop back to 200GB in a month or two — especially since I’m using less iCloud storage now. (I’ve gone back to Aperture-iTunes and a lightning cable for getting photos to my devices).

Update: After doing this I realized our family total is now just 67GB. So I downgraded to 200GB. Interestingly this didn’t take effect immediately — I wonder if it will take until the end of the current month. I’m not that concerned about the delay but it is a bit annoying. Note that we currently pay $4 for 200GB for each of four users, but will pay $3 for 200GB shared between 5 users. The 25% cost reduction is nice (I’m cheap) but the real deal is that a shared 200GB is far more efficient. My daughter will end up using 150GB and the rest of us will be fine with the residual 50GB. I’ll move the family to 2TB if/when we need to. Perhaps by summer 2020 Apple will have enhanced Photos.app and iCloud Photo Library enough for me to switch off Aperture. I’ll need the 2TB for that.

Update 11/8/2017: I checked with Apple Support via Twitter. We prepay for storage. When you go up it’s an immediate change and you are billed in a prorated fashion. When you go down the change applies to next billing cycle.

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[1] On the one hand the 50GB cap does motivate her to edit things. That’s good, but really she has enough stuff to deal with.  She doesn’t need one more painful discipline. Sometimes I gotta walk my Dad mistakes back …

How to do a simple random image picture frame type slideshow in iOS 11 on an iPad.

You know how you look for something on the web and you can’t find it?

That’s because it can’t be done with the base OS and nobody talks about the features that Apple has removed. There’s no ad revenue in that.

But I don’t take ads, so here you go.

This post exists to tell you that as of iOS 11 you can’t create a random picture-frame like slideshow on an iPad without a 3rd party app. Yes, the iPad used to be able to this. Once upon a time you could set a random image display up as a lock screen. Later this was moved to the Photos app.

With iOS 10 it died. In Photo albums on an iPad there’s a slideshow button (top right), but it only plays linearly. Which I loathe.

There are slideshow options by the way. They are insanely obscure. Start a slideshow. When an image appears, tap on it. There are a few options. No “shuffle” though.

There used to be an excellent third party app to do picture frame slideshows called Picmatic. My father loved it. He died before I updated his iPad to IOS 10. Good thing, because iOS 10 broke Picmatic and the developer never updated it (damn thing needed #$!$ subscription pricing).

There’s one “Picture Frame” app left on the App Store — LiveFrame.app. It worked with my Google shared libraries, but even though it could “see” my iCloud Shared Libraries it would hang when I tried to use them.

I’ve been fairly disgusted with iCloud Shared Libraries so I decided to try life without them (to be fair all image sharing except Instagram seems to have died). I turned iCloud Shared Libraries off on all my devices. I’d already given up on iCloud Photo Library. Then I went back to the stone age. I connected iTunes 12.7 to my iPad with a Lightning cable and had it sync 8,300 images from my Aperture “slideshow” smart album.

Of course the sync didn’t go easily. The image transfer aborted 3 times — without any notice. Mercifully the sync restarted where it left off. Unlike iCloud Photo Sharing I think iTunes supports a true 1 way sync; updates are relatively painless.

With the photos on my iPad, and no evil iCloudness, LiveFrame.app works. It’s no Picmatic, but it’s there. The developer should go to subscription pricing so they have an incentive to keep it around. There’s zero competition and this app is a perfect fit for subscription (no data lock, nothing to prevent switching).

Note — this slide show doesn’t need a data connection. The images are on the iPad.

So today one Apple thing worked — albeit an old thing. Sort of. That’s pretty good for Apple in 2017. (I can’t believe people are buying the iPhone X. Are they insane?!?)

iCloud Family Sharing storage: What happens to Alice's photos when Bob drops her from the Family?

Alice and Bob are a “Family”. Bob, the Family Organizer, pays 2TB of iCloud shared storage. Alice has a 1TB iCloud Photo Library.

Alice and Bob split. Bob drops Alice from the “Family”. What happens to Alice’s photo library?

Apple doesn’t discuss this in their support article on leaving family sharing [1]. So I asked on Apple Discussions. I received several responses that seemed suspiciously knowledgeable [2].

There’s nothing written down, but I think both of these responses are correct …

"Apple is allowing a grace period to transition without issues, but that is an unstated, voluntary policy. AFAIK, Apple makes no promises of any kind that this policy won’t change, or even that it will be applied to all users.”

and

"iCloud keeps all of the information associated with your Apple/iCloud ID for 30 days whenever you have a payment issue or change.

When you joined Family Sharing, your Photo Library did not move or get re-associated with the Apple/iCloud ID that "owns" that data. It is tied to your ID even if you went with the Family Sharing plan. All that does is move the responsibility for paying for the storage from you to the Family Sharing organizer.

All you need to do is leave the Family Sharing plan, and then upgrade your iCloud Storage. Anything that was stored under your Apple/iCloud ID will remain in iCloud for 30 days, so if there is a gap between when you leave (or were removed) from Family Sharing and when you upgrade your iCloud Storage, as long as it doesn’t exceed 30 days, you should be good to go."

My takeaway is:

1. Apple needs to write this down.
2. Alice probably has 30 days to up her storage before she loses her photos (or, if Alice is geeky, she can move them locally).
3. Alice should probably up her storage before she’s dropped from Bob’s account (assuming she has warning).
4. Alice should always have a local full res Photos.app Library that’s backed up to a local drive (probably not by Time Machine, Apple is shockingly unclear about whether Photos.app can be safely backed up by Time Machine).

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[1] This is worth reading. I thought that children, on reaching 18, could retain a copy of DRMd material. Either I remembered incorrectly or policy changed. Effectively any FairPlay DRMd item has only one iTunes account owner.

[2] I think some respondents on Apple Discussions have inside information. I don’t know if they are contractors or employees or what.

My latest attempt to reclaim my wife's stolen email address from Facebook

You cannot reclaim a personal email address used by a stranger’s Facebook account. Facebook’s procedures do nothing. 

Today I tried something different.

To review, a year or so ago my wife started getting Facebook notifications from “Ding”. Her iCloud email address was used by “Ding Ling” (https://www.facebook.com/ding.ling.98031) to create a Facebook account. I don’t know if my wife accidentally validated it or not but we’ve been unable to retrieve her email address.

Since we control the email we can reset the account password, but Facebook’s poorly documented procedures to reclaim the address did nothing.

So this time I again reset the password but then I followed Facebook’s directions to upload a legal ID (a way to take control of the account):

I used my drivers license as a template to get past Facebook’s image size test then overlayed a text image requesting release of her email address.

I’ll update this post if it works. 

Yeah, there should be a law.

Update 10/29/2017

It worked. It took a few go rounds. Eventually I was directed to the same kind of form I’d submitted a year ago, but this time it got to a human. I had to send a summary response email from Emily’s iCloud account. I think it helped to point out that “Ding Ling” was obviously a fake account. Once the email was retrieved I added it to her account.

I wonder if somehow it mattered that Emily has both an iCloud and a “me” address for the same account (due to Apple’s old mobile.me migration). Her .me address was already associated with her Facebook account.

iCloud calendar invitations to non-iCloud accounts are still broken

It’s been over a year since I first posted that iCloud invitations to a non-iCloud (ex: Google) account have been broken since 2011. Briefly, if someone sends an invitation from iCloud to my gmail address I’ll never see it. Somehow Apple looks up one of the four (that I know of[1]) iCloud accounts that I have, presumably one that references my gmail address, and uses that one instead.

In late 2016 Apple introduced an obscure workaround, an advanced iCloud (only) Calendar setting to receive event invitations by email — “if your primary calendar is not iCloud”.

I was working on a book chapter today so I revisited the old bug to check out the workaround. From my son’s (unused) iCloud Calendar I sent myself an invitation. Despite the setting nothing appeared in any of my (unused) Apple iCloud Calendars.

I waded through my Apple IDs to identify which one was associated with that Gmail address. I had to answer Apple’s “secret” questions [2] several times, but I found an Apple ID of mine associated with an iCloud account that did had the “receive by email” option enabled and had iCloud mail services. I tried from several iCloud accounts; none of the invitations appeared anywhere. They didn’t show as email, they didn’t show up on my iCloud calendar. They went into the ether.

Apple iCloud calendar invitations to non-iCloud addresses are still broken.

[1] Multiple iCloud accounts, some with email services and some without, is a longstanding Apple fiasco. Cook promised to clean it up several years ago and quietly abandoned hope. I periodically read hints from insiders that Apple’s identity management is more screwed up than even the most cynical outsiders can imagine.

[2] Also known as a hacker’s best friend.

 

Photos.app flailing during sync with iCloud Photo Library? Maybe it's a permissions problem.

My daughter uses Photos.app and a 50 GB iCloud Photo Library to manage her videos and images [1]. She edits on an older Air with a small SSD, in that environment Photos.app caches scaled res images and only downloads full res when editing.

In addition I run an instance of Photos.app for her that stores full res images. The Photos.app Library is stored on an external SSD that hangs off an Elgato T2 Hub attached to my beloved Air. The hub has been very reliable under El Cap and Sierra.

I have a user account for her on my drive, and in that account the external library is the Photos.app System Library. My Time Machine [3] and Carbon Copy [4] backups include that Library.

All was well under El Capitan. A few months ago I upgraded to Sierra [2]. Yesterday I decided to update her Photos.app library — only to discover I was a few months behind [5]. Her user account hadn’t been updated to Sierra; when I opened Photos.app her Library had to be updated.

Things did not go well. Photos.app said it was uploading @8,000 images (really it shouldn’t have uploaded anything, but Photos.app sucks), then @2,000, then @11, then … You get the idea. It did that when I went to bed, and it was doing it in the morning.

After a bit of playing around I discovered that a Sierra bug meant that she no longer had write permissions to the external SSD, even though macOS said she did. I switched to an admin account and there she had no permissions, so I added her. After that she could write to the SSD. Photos.app “stuck upload” was because it had no write permissions at all.

I decided to create a fresh Photos.app Library for her. To do that I turned off WiFi and did option-Photos.app startup to create a new Library. I copied the old Library to an external drive and deleted it. I then opened the new Library, made it the System Library (interestingly it showed images from a cache!), turned on WiFi and enabled iCloud Photo Library. The images then downloaded from iCloud (source of truth) and restored my local backup copy.

- fn -

[1] She is chronically running against the limit — which isn’t all bad. It enforces some editing. I might switch to sharing a 200GB plan, but I’m not sure how that will work with our current family use of a single iTunes password. Future experiment needed.

[2] I like to wait at least 8 months before accepting Apple’s dangerously buggy macOS updates.

[3] Our two Airs do Time Machine backups up to a Synology NAS. After some initial issues that has been utterly trouble-free. The NAS has two RAID 1 drives, if one fails the other survives. This is another reason I wait for macOS bugs to get fixed; I also need things like VMs and NAS to be updated.

[4] CCC backups to a 4TB low heat drive in a Voyager cradle with Firewire 800 connection to the Elgato hub. I rotate 4 drives. Rotation is every 2-3 weeks, 1 drive is across town, the other in my Van. A Yellowstone eruption would take them all out unless the van outran the pyroclastic flow. It is a shame that offsite internet backup has failed.

[5] Only automated backup ever works — and no form of backup is reliable.

Mobile device management and Apple Classroom for home

Contrary to Ziff-Davis (ok, it was 2013) there are several vendors who provide MDM solutions for home use. MMGuardian and Qustudio are two of them.

I wonder though if it’s possible to cobble something together at home that would work with Apple Classroom. OS X server ($20) includes Profile Manager, Apple’s MDM manager (support). Joshua Jung has written a nice tutorial on getting Profile Manger working. In theory Apple Classroom should be able to work with this …

Anyone try it?