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I imagine there’s a possible justification of libraries getting broken because Photos.app doesn’t know how to handle partial syncs gracefully. Many apps don’t.
by simondotau 4y ago
I imagine there’s a possible justification of libraries getting broken because Photos.app doesn’t know how to handle partial syncs gracefully. Many apps don’t.
(Though I also agree Apple really does need to clean up its own room before worrying about what third party software is doing.)
- huggingmouth 4y agoWait. I thought partial syncs are never visible to the rest of the system. Files are either synced or they're not. AFAIK, synching does it this way.
- zbentley 4y agoDoing an atomic-swap sync of a folder (which is what a photo library is) can result in momentary doubling of size-on-disk. For something as big as a photo library that may not be acceptable/possible. The solution (differential syncs with atomic update and with support for the version being diffed against changing during the sync) are quite tricky to get working reliability, and they get less reliable the larger the atomic unit of data is. All that is also assuming that there's a way for the sync program to interpret what units (files or folders) the user wants to be updated slowly/expensively/atomically, which is itself very hard to solve without adding friction or foot guns.
- kccqzy 4y agoAPFS has copy-on-write semantics. I regularly duplicate my entire photo library folder. Just duplicate a large folder in Finder and you'll notice (a) it's instantaneous (b) it doesn't cause the disk usage to increase appreciably.