Unfortunately my cell service provider is Rogers, which means my choices for phones are pretty much limited to Samsungs with useless and annoying bloatware, or iPhones that receive pictures in resolutions that haven’t been acceptable since the very first LCD monitors came out.

Seeing as half of my friends are the kind of iPhone users who unironically talk about being fearful of The Green Bubble™ and I had an iPod Touch growing up, my first phone back in 2017 ended up being an iPhone 6. But enough about phones. I’m pretty annoyed right now, and I feel compelled to write about the thing that’s annoying me rather than continue the troubleshooting process like I probably should.

My family has had a shared iCloud storage plan for many years, which wasn’t much of a problem until recently when we kept maxing out the 200 GB of storage space. (side note, who the hell decided that a 200 GB plan is still acceptable in 2023?) I decided to install iCloud on my computer and transfer a bunch of old photos over, because downloading pictures from the iCloud website strips them of their metadata for some reason. This was when the problems began.

iCloud has always been excruciatingly slow for downloads/uploads compared to services like OneDrive or Dropbox, but on Windows 10 it seemed to be even worse than usual. I was getting speeds only the Internet Archive would deem acceptable these days. There was also no way to pick which storage device iCloud downloads your photos to, so my boot drive was constantly full as a result.

Oh, and the best part? You can’t take them off iCloud. Even if a picture is downloaded to the iCloud Photos folder on your local storage, trying to move them to a different folder or hard drive yields an error that says either of the following things:

Some of your photos and videos are currently unavailable. Please try again later.

The cloud operation was unsuccessful.

This operation is not supported by your cloud sync provider.

So in other words, you can’t just cut+paste files from iCloud onto your hard drive. Whether this is because Apple is so incompetent at making software for Windows or if it’s another one of their increasingly desperate attempts to lock you into their ecosystem is beyond me, but the latter sure sounds like a possibility with the current state of Apple. Either way, this is just pathetic, and it really shows how much iCloud has fallen behind over the years. Use Dropbox instead. Heck, upload stuff to the Internet Archive. You’ll save at least half a second doing so.