How to Speed Up iCloud Photo Uploads from your iPhone

Uploading a large photo library from an iOS device can be painfully slow. Here's a quick video to walk you through the steps I've used twice now to migrate large amounts of data to iCloud from my iPhone. Features custom captions for clarity.

The Zero-Sleep Method

1) Plug in your iPhone and connect to Wifi
2) Open settings
3) Go to display and brightness
4) Select Auto lock and set it "Never"
5) Return to settings and tap your profile
6) Tap iCloud
7) Make sure iCloud Photos is enabled and leave it on this screen....
.... and wait, this will take along time, depending on library size and your internet speed. This will not "speed up" uploading, rather keep it continously uploading.

A few users reported leaving it on the Photos screen worked as they could see the progress bar there. Also, if you're looking to keep things moving and have unlimited data or a huge data plan, you can enable unlimited updates.

Go to settings and scroll down and tap Photos
Tap Cellular Data
Warning, this will use a lot of cellular data! Toggle on Cellur Data and unlimited updates

Written version

This is a quick one-off tech tips style video as I've noticed lately on my blog, that a very old article from 2015 about how to speed iCloud Photos is getting a lot of traffic again. While updating it, I decided to film a video and make it a nice short YouTube video. This is as quick of a turn for any video I've made to date..

Hopefully you find it useful.

[MahinurKhanx]

Man, this is crazy! TBH, I found this video after watching hundreds of videos, and this is insane! The 2-minute video changed my life. I am so happy today. My 183GB successfully uploaded now within 3 days. Before that, I was having issues for 2 months, trying my best to upload my photos to iCloud. It didn't work like the last 3 days. Now all perfect. And my phone storage decreased from 253GB to 91GB! Thanks again for your self-made amazing tricks!

[ridarza]

Oh Wow this really worked!! i’ve been looking for videos that would help, Nothing has helped, this one was specifc w the help iwas looking for. my iphone storage was already FULL (119GB/ 124GB), literally did everything u said this morning, fell aslee for a little, left my phone on, wake up and it’s now (48GB/124GB) THANK U BRO!!

[Nariator]

I had 60k items to upload, 20k of them were uploaded in literally a month and a half.

Using your method the other 40k were uploaded in less than a week, Thank you so much

[mark_slk]

This is the best guide video so far!! Simple and straight to the point. I’ve watched many other videos which just make me more confused.

[romydalapo]

It works! Before I found this video, Only around 5k items (photos & videos) was uploaded in 2 and a half days. After following these tips which was yesterday, I've uploaded 11, 600+ items in 24 hours. I have 11k more to sync. Phew!

It would've taken me weeks or month maybe. So thank you so much for sharing these to us.

[jackox]

Great advice, sped up the process significantly. Thank you!

[tejask]

Sometimes I hate Apple, a simple task of backing up photos should not be this complicated and should be handled automatically!

[perezparty]

Just used these tips and it worked wonders thank you for the great video!

[InfamousRomie]

i hope this works cuz it’s taking days to sync 11k+ photos/videos 😂

[Goddesssenergy]

I never really comment on yt videos but youRe a blessing THANKYOU so much this worked like magic

[insightfuljohn]

Wow, this is actually super useful! I have 70+ photos that are stuck for more than 1 hour, within 5min they are all done!

[mambaever]

Thank you so much! This worked incredibly, I was able to upload my photos exponentially faster through this method.

[thewalkoflife]

I feel like this helped. I was frustrated to see buy phone taking forever to upload 222 (mostly 4k videos). It took a couple days to cut that in half and then I tried these tips and I was able to upload the remaining 135 or so overnight.!

[ivanmytube]

All ideas mentioned are to reduce hiccups but not speeding up uploading. I found that the only way to really speed up uploading is to do parallel uploading. You need to split the 50000 photos library to a few smaller libraries, say 5000 photos in 10 libraries, then transfer each smaller photo libraries as the default system library to a seperate mac, there you need 10 mac’s, each of them logged in to the same Apple ID and iCloud Photos enabled. In this way, you are really syncing multiple libraries in parallel to the icloud photos. Bear in mind, your internet upload speed is likely the bottleneck.

[MartinGawron]

Thank You took 2 days for 28k! If you want to sync from your MacBook, keep it plugged in and disable sleep and when stay at the lockscreen, it will sync faster aswell

[mladenovskitv]

Why its so painfull.. why its not easy like android just copy and paste using a pc

[Jay-midg]

Thank you for this video!! Been waiting for so long for my photos gallery to catch up and I just don’t have the time! Hopefully this helps with video edits thank you dude!

[elisalzman]

Thanks so much for this, it seems to have helped a lot of people. But is it really true that the upload won’t happen if screen is locked? Because I have SE2020, and because it has normal LCD I am very worried about screen burn. If the phone is plugged in overnight (which eliminates low power mode anyway), I would have thought that it would keep uploading. But yeah I’m on night 3 and it only managed 5% of an only 45gb library, and the internet here is quite fast. Any advice?

[jessicasantossilva]

thank you so much for your video I lost 2% battery but it's worth it I was very happy to finally sync my phone it took about 2 days

[kittycat]

Thank you so much i finally got to save my storage device too and do this and thank you so very much