I think many people use their iPad to show holiday picures - until now I synchronized the corresponding albums via iTunes, drove for example to my parents (they don’t have Internet…) and showed them the pictures of our last family holiday.)
Now I tried the new iCloud photo library and created just 3 example-albums (“Holiday 1-3”) on my iMac. On my iPad I enabled iCloud-library and chose “Optimize storage”, eyverything synchronized: so far, so good.
But then I realized that the “optimized” versions on my iPad are only pixelated low-resolution pictures that are unusable for a presentation to other people. With a fast WLAN it took 15-20 seconds per picture to load the full-resolution version via Internet, far too long. Without internet (e.g. at my parents home) I coluld not show anything at all besides the thumbnail versions. Any solutions ? There doesn’t seem to be an option to load pictures of an album “in advance”, if I for example know, that I will present these pictures later. Or have I misunderstood something ? By the way, there is enough storage on the iPad (20 GB), the albums contain of only 5 GB.
I haven’t really got a good answer to this, but I have seen the same thing happening.
However the 15-20 sec thing seems to be a once only event. though I guess this may depend on the capacity of your iPad and how many photos are involved.
My wife’s iPad Air seems to avoid this problem but my iPad Mini suffers from it. Both have plenty of spare capacity so that isn’t the reason.
On my iPad Mini I can work around it by selecting all photos (or all I might want to be showing) and running slideshow beforehand. This forces the download of full-size images so then later I can show them without the 15-20 second issue.
I have used the same slideshow solution and it works for the one time I use this “trick”. However the next time I access that album I have to use the same “trick” again, and again… Have plenty of space on my iPad and would like for the “full size” files to remain. Maybe in the future Apple will add the ability to select which photos to store full size on your iPad.
Paul
It definitely is a one-time solution for me….and after doing it I see the size of the Photos Lib in General -> Usage -> Storage ->. manage storage increase as a result.
After testing again found that all of the images (~800) were not all completely loading when playing the slide show. Also, having gone through different sections of the album and moving between photos after download started (but without waiting for download to complete) found later that while I assumed the downloads would complete after I moved onto other photos, apparently the photos were not always finishing to download. Since then have gone through album one photo at a time and made sure each photo downloaded. Once the download is complete the full photo remains on the iPad. Would prefer if there was a way to tell Photos to download a full album, then be able to walk away and come back later and have the photos all downloaded.
Paul
I agree, I found today that the slideshow method is not foolproof. Some don’t get fully downloaded. The ones that didn’t wouldn’t download manually either. The circle appeared bottom right and filled to about 25% then stuck.
Eventually I was able to get all ~800 pictures to load. In process also learned that even when I thought a picture had fully downloaded, when I clicked on Edit, sometimes the picture still had more downloading to do. Did notice that the ones that seemed to “hang” we’re often ones I had previously edited. Once a photo has fully downloaded it does seem to stay. My reason for doing this is that I wanted to be able to go through the pictures and cull out the ones I do not want to go into a book. Think next time I will try to refrain from editing until I have finished the culling step. Culling usually takes me multiple passes through and like being able to do this on the iPad.
Paul