An Easy One - Getting the Photos off my Phone

 

I've gotten this far several times and quit in despair.

So I go into Settings -> iCloud and see I have something called "photo sharing" on which nobody ever asked me about. Turn it off. But how do I actually delete stuff?

I seem to have 1.5 G available on iCloud. Is my phone really more full than that? And what is that 3.5 G on iCloud. I never asked for anything to be there. Fortunately I press the Storage widget under iCloud and come across Manage Storage. (IOS: Settings -> iCloud -> Storage - Manage Storage)

 Appears most of what is in use is the previous backup. Which indeed is 3.4 G. So I can erase that.

But when I pick "Delete Backup" it says "turn off backups" implicitly forever? Some confusion because this replacement phone has THE SAME NAME as the busted phone it replaced. So I have "m's stuff" and "m's stuff" in the backup list. It turns out it is OK to delete "m's stuff" from being backed up because "m's stuff" will still be backed up.

Despite the fact that I have Google Fiber, it now estimates 20 minutes to do the initial backup. I hope later ones will be faster.

(Using my quarter hour to read up on Time Machine. Wikipedia is pretty opaque. I think I DO want to be able to support networked machines. This is more clear.)

OK, backup done. Did that really get my apps saved somewhere?

So try again to update... 

GO into iTunes. ask for Sync. Proceeds quickly. No apps showing!

Apparently this mess. So still haven;t moved apps into iTunes. 

This is really conflicting messages. My update message implies that moving my apps into iTunes is normal. But the linked page seems to think it is rare. "The easiest way to add past iTunes Store purchases to your iOS device is to redownload them from iTunes in the Cloud." wtf?

Anyway, iTunes: File > Devices > Transfer Purchases from "[device name]" isn't really all that difficult, but it sure is opaque! Now I have to find the software update thingy again.

Apparently ejecting and reconnecting the iPhone is the right way to do this. (eyeroll)

Process seems weird at several points. At one instant I see an icon on the phone showing a USB cable pointing at an iTunes icon. Was that supposed to be an instruction of some kind?

OK, 45 minutes into this, I now see 

Of course I want to "learn more", and in a Chrome window appears this

which of course contains little in the way of actual information. So I comply. I am a good boy. That only took a few seconds. OK, great! Now can I synch my photos?

Yes. OK, some fumbling around in Photos, and now over 1000 images are being imported to the Mac. I suppose that counts as success. Were these all lurking on my old iPhone?

Anyway, Photos turns out to be a woefully crippled version of iPhoto, which wasn't anything great either, though I really liked the effects in one old version as I said. But whatever. Here's a pretty picture from my camera and a recent morning walk. Austin is great, even if Apple isn't anymore.

Elapsed time: 1 hr 5 minutes.

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Noted in this process: When I mail myself, my nickname shows up as "Holidays in the United States" for no reason I can imagine. Maybe I need to fix that too.

This also seems germane: moving music. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204318

Tried to modify or delete Holidays in the United States, somehow ended up placing a FaceTime call to it. Does anybody ever use FaceTime? Anyway, so now my computer starts beeping at me. 

Reminds me of another irritant. Somehow, when my phone rings my computer starts ringing too. But when I pick up my phone, the computer does not stop ringing! I never asked for this "feature"!

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Also, Blogger offers me uploads "from my phone" but it's current only as of a year ago. No idea how it's supposed to see any of that anyway.

General Grumble

I've been in the computer business too long. Among the side effects of this is that I am old, and in danger of becoming stupid. And if you saw my computing setup today, you wouldn't call me smart.

I think the blame isn't all mine. It seems that the longer you've stuck with Apple, the more f'ed up your setup is, at least if you don't jump all the hurdles as they come up.

Right now I have ITunes on the computer I use with exactly one song on it. My new IPhone replacement agrees. Even though the old computer was authorized on the same account. People seem disgruntled with Apple Music/iTunes. I've never been happy about it.

I can't upgrade IOS on my phone because it tells me that I'll lose some purchased apps. I thought I had synched the purchased apps. My iCloud is griping that it's full. I have a Pages file on iCloud and I don't know how to find it when I want it.

A lot of pictures are in various versions of iPhoto. The version I liked best got erased in an upgrade - an effect I was making excellent use of went away. I don't even know what version that was. My iPhoto pics are everywhere. I have photos on my phone that aren't syncing to iPhoto or the new photo app (Photos, which I pronounce to rhyme with Phobos.)

I'd like to set up a proper coding environment, but there's so much hassle involved with that that I don't dare before I have Time Machine set up. My external drive isn't even hooked up but when I try it gripes that it's too small.

Sharing printers? You jest. Wireless audio to the living room? It is to laugh. Doing something other than the blatantly obvious with my Apple TV gizmo? No ideas at all.

And so on. I will try to solve these more or less one at a time. Maybe somebody from Apple wants to watch. Otherwise, you might conceivably get help on something you've searched for,

But mostly this is meant to log my struggles and embarrass me into prevailing over them.