Photos on El Capitan with iCloud Photo Library losing photos?

Flint_6

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Feb 7, 2016
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I recently wanted to use iCloud Photo Library to have a cloud backup of my precious personal memories. I had my library set up in Photos in El Capitan and enabled iCloud Photo Library. It's still uploading but I experienced some disturbing effects.

Then, suddenly, I realize that some photos and movies have an exclamation mark. Clicking on it tells me that Photos was either not able to find the original file, or sometimes it says it was not able to download the original from iCloud and that I should try later.

The thing is: I'm on the Mac where the main Photos library is. It should upload everything from here. This is the Master Copy. Why has Photos deleted some local files in the first place and is trying to download them from iCloud again when it should just have that file on the local hard drive? Has this happened to anybody?

When logging in to iCloud.com and going into the Photos app, I can see the movie file is there. So it managed to upload it there, thank god. But how can I re-link the missing file to that iCloud copy again?

Here are my questions to this situation.
1) Is there any way to create a smart album showing me all the photos to which Photos doesn't find the local file? An album with all photos and movies that have an exclamation mark?

2) Is there any way to re-connect a missing file to a copy in iCloud? Or can I download the file from iCloud and re-connect the missing file from Photos to a local file on my hard drive? Or do I need to import that photo again and put it manually into any album I had it in previously?

3) Is this upload process normal? Does Photos upload all images and movies to iCloud, then deleting the original and downloading the file back from iCloud? Is this a weird first sync issue that will resolve itself once I let the process of uploading everything to iCloud finish? But why has Photos deleted the file in the first place? This seems to weird to me.

4) If nothing helps and I see that iCloud has got all the originals and everything is there, but the local library refuses to get the original files from iCLoud, how can I reset my local iPhoto library and re-download everything from iCloud without endangering my album, photos, videos and all settings and edits I did?

Thanks for your help! It's really appreciated.
 

Just_Me_D

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Jan 8, 2012
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1. Transfer the pics that are on your computer to an external hard drive / USB drive.
2. Sign out of iCloud on your computer.
3. Reboot your computer.
4. Sign back in to iCloud and allow your pics and other iCloud data to re-sync to your computer.
 

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