When I try to download the photo I need to complete my blog post today, I get a message box titled:
Photos could not be downloaded.
With the additional information below stating:
Photos could not be downloaded at this time due to an error. Please try again later.
It's remarkable how opaque this "information" is. What kind of error, and by whom? It's basically telling me nothing I don't already know, except that the "try again later" qualification at least sounds hopeful. But how long should I keep trying until I try to get support, or perhaps even an attorney?
One might wonder if it is one's own error. Perhaps the iCloud session had timed out. No, apparently it hadn't, I could go through all my other information, scroll through my photos, and then I even discovered I could download other photos. Just not certain photos I had taken last night, almost 12 hours ago.
Ok, the particular photos in mind were actually RTA images stored by Analyzer. But I just finished downloading a bunch of those from last night, it just balked with the curious error message when I got to the last few.
So I downloaded some other images, then about half an hour later found I could download 2 of the photos I had been needing. But not the last two.
I'm still waiting for those to get out of jail or whatever it is that Apple will only explain to me in the vaguest terms.
All this brings to mind a principle I've been advocating for a long time. Local is best.
It's much better to have local storage (and computing) on your own local devices whenever possible. Then it can't be denied for one of a multitude of reasons, some technical, some administrative. Basically, you can't trust anyone else to deliver information to you when you need it. For all that kind of information, or basically everything of significance you need, you need to have your own local copy.
But what if your own devices fail? If it's the storage that has failed, it should be provided by your own local backup, of which you should have at least 2. Then one more non-local backup.
If it's the computing hardware that has failed, or you can't use even that for some administrative reason, then you can't do anything anyway.
Following this philosophy, I had never used cloud anything by choice, until required to by Apple, because my Apple iPhone would no longer "trust" my Apple computer running (by my choice) an older Apple OS.
This is the year I plan to buy a new Apple computer, grandfathering my old computer with it's old OS in place. But until I do that, I've needed iCloud to bridge the gap and still let me work with my photos.
And I have generally not liked it at all. I vastly preferred downloading my photos directly to my own computer.
One plausible theory is that Apple must clear any images that were not made by the iPhone camera following some protocol that ensures it is not being used to transmit illegal information such as child pornography. And for some reason, the server that performs that checking is bogged down, so it can't approve your image yet.
Update: the problem seemed to have gone away immediately after pressing the "refresh" button on my Chrome browser. That brought me back to the home page (where'd I'd been before...but possibly only from cached copy). Thence I selected photos and the desired images could be downloaded.
This still isn't a complete explanation of why my files were essentially unavailable for download even when I was able to download all but the last ones.
