iCloud Photos gets right everything that Apple Music gets wrong. Like Marco, I can imagine many reasons why Apple took a different route with music than the clean-slate approach they took with photos. I’m not in a position to judge what Apple should have done. All I’m saying is that the difference in results is stark. I understand the design and purpose of Photos (the app) on both Mac and iOS, and I understand how iCloud Photo Library is supposed to work. And, for me — and seemingly, almost everyone — that’s how iCloud Photo Library does work. You sign up, you enable it on all your devices, you wait for the initial sync to finish, and boom — now all your photos are available on all your devices, all the time.
Daring Fireball: Apple Music vs. iCloud Photos. My jaw dropped — it actually did — when I read this. I signed up, and I have some photos on my Mac, and some on my iPhone, and some on my iPad, and it’s such an absolute mess that I have abandoned them all and am just using the Mac file system plus Dropbox to order my photos. The iCloud Photo Library works for “almost everyone”? Seriously?
Not one iCloud feature works reliably for me. Not calendars, not Reminders, not Photos, not Notes — nothing. In every single case I have items on one device that do not sync to my other devices.