Hello and welcome to the latest thrilling instalment of Craig’s First World Problems. WWDC25 is looming, and the Apple faithful are limbering up their necks for a week of vigorous nodding and whooping at whatever Tim, Craig and the gang decide to unveil. Me? I’m here to smash out some words bellyaching about a long-standing iPhone niggle until my editor drags me kicking and screaming from the keyboard. It’s the number-one item on my personal WWDC25 wish list. Which, because this issue is so infuriatingly annoying, contains precisely one item: for Apple to fix my iPhone sporadically point-blank refusing to sync photos to iCloud.
Look, I get it. This is no world-shattering crisis. Sync is a luxury. And I do remember the dark days of film. Prising the roll from a camera in a pitch-black room, lest the merest glimmer of sunlight nuke my precious memories. Then trudging to the local pharmacy to drop off the film, waiting a few hours, and then picking up an envelope of blurry disappointments and a sticker that basically said, “Don’t quit your day job.”
Fortunately, digital then arrived, which was terribly exciting until the point you realised all your photos now lived on a computer. Which was a tad inconvenient to lug around to a friend’s house when you wanted to enrapture them with snaps of a beach holiday that felt like magic to you but looked like piles of sand to them. A decade later, sync promised to make all such problems go away (except for your friends, who you’d continue to inflict holiday snaps on), at least when it works. Which it often doesn’t.
Wishful syncing
My iCloud Photos sync dance goes much like this. I’ll take a photo or screenshot on my iPhone and wait for it to sync. After staring at the Photos app on my iMac for some minutes like an idiot, I’ll head back to Photos on my iPhone. I’ll tap my profile pic, and be greeted with the familiar (and deeply annoying and unwelcome) message ‘Optimising System Performance’. Or, if my iPhone fancies a bit of a change, ‘Optimising Battery Performance’.
I’ll go through the motions. Turn sync off and on. Grumble. Reboot the phone. Wait for it to inexplicably take ages to reconnect to Wi-Fi. Open Photos (again). Wait some more. Override the apparently eternal ‘optimisation’ prompt. All while wondering what, exactly, is being optimised. Because whatever it is, it’s not photo sync.
Now, I do understand uploading photos and videos can drain a battery. I don’t want my iPhone attempting to throw massive videos at iCloud when I’m in the middle of a city, desperately trying to locate a train station, with my iPhone’s battery level hovering at 2%. But when my phone is fully charged, connected to home Wi-Fi, and doing absolutely nothing else, it’s reasonable to assume I’d like a photo uploaded right away, please. Not at a random moment overnight when the stars align and the Apple gods decree my request acceptable.
So, sure, there are all kinds of things Apple could announce at WWDC for iOS 26 that would make me smile. Meaningful design changes. AI integration that’s not mere gloss atop a creaky foundation. App Library sort options. Stage Manager for iPhone that finally transforms it into the one device to rule them all. Even Apple Games. All those would be fab.
But really, I’d just like iPhone photos sync fixed.
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