Today I will depart from my normal hiking and writing posts. Today I want to rant (you’ve been warned) about digital photos.

After many years as a Microsoft/Windows user just to be in sync with my day job, I converted to Apple/Mac to get away from the Windows upgrades that felt like downgrades. Now, Apple had given us High Sierra which leads me to believe they took lessons on irritating customers from Microsoft. Digital Photos will serve as proof.

I keep my digital photos on an external drive due to the amount of space they take up. With the new High Sierra OS that Apple has inflicted upon us, my external no longer works. That was fine. Externals only last so long and it was time to upgrade anyway. I upgraded my laptop and left my desktop alone until I could upgrade my external. At this point I started to experience issues with my Photos application. I could upload pics from my camera to Photos but those photos couldn’t be shared ANYWHERE. Then I discovered that the photos from my iPhone were not syncing up with Photos either. Troubleshooting revealed nothing.

I then decided to move the Photos application back to my iMac. It’s a big boy and can handle the storage load. After moving Photos to my iMac, I discovered the photos I took yesterday on a hike weren’t there. After much searching and just a few expletives, I tried to copy the pics from the external drive to the hard drive on my iMac. No joy.

At this point, you are forgiven for thinking I should just store everything in the cloud. Two issues. One, Apple’s iCloud would cost too much considering how many photos I have. Two, While I keep weekly backups (may have to make that daily), I don’t want my photos to disappear in the cloud as has happened to a couple of people I know.

I won’t bore you with all the options I tried before resorting to a very convoluted method of retrieving these pics. In the end, I used AirDrop to send the pics from my external drive to my phone. Using AirDrop again, I sent the pics from my phone to my iMac, and finally copied the pics from Preview on my iMac to the Photos app on my iMac.

Apple, there has to be a better way.