Uh-oh. Stephen Hackett is done with iCloud Photo Library:

A bunch of empty duplicate albums would be annoying to clean up, but upon digging, I discovered that not all my albums had been duplicated. Some — including one with 1800 family photos from a vacation — had been overwritten with an empty album of the same name.

Turning iCloud Photo Library back on from my iPad introduced some sort of leftover data not deleted from my iCloud account, overwriting (and removing) newer data on my Mac.

Because I am a nerd, I have backups. I have all of my photos safe and sound, but I’ve got iCloud Photo Library off forever now. I can’t trust it after this failure. I know that there’s a lot of talk that CloudKit is better than the shit Apple first shipped with iCloud, but this is unacceptable.

Not cool.

I used DropBox to back up all my iPhone photos—specifically I used the Carousel app from Dropbox (I also use Image Capture in OS X to backup photos to manually backup an external drive).

When you launch Carousel, it immediately starts backing up your entire camera roll (with you permission). Over the last 8 years or so, Dropbox has earned my trust. When it tells me files have been synced, I believe them.

For whatever reason, Apple is still having problems managing files in the cloud, whether it’s music or photos. They really need to fix this.