So Apple released iOS 9 last night at 6pm UK time, and after a few glitches trying to download, iOS 9 had installed on my work iPad Air.

I then upgraded on my MacBook my iCloud storage plan and moved to the £0.79 per month 50gb capacity option. I am hoping this is enough, otherwise it will rise to £2.49 for the 200gb plan.

I had imported photos in to the Photos app going back from Feb 2015, around 400 shots in total. I now had around 4,000 photos and a selection of videos in my Photos app on my MacBook. I had gone through the collection and deleted several older shots or near duplicates to free up space.

So now I switched on iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos with Photostream and iCloud Photos being backed up and then all the other iCloud options. When I switched on the iCloud Photo option, I got a message saying referenced photos would not be uploaded, and these needed to be consolidated first.

WTF.

I had no idea what this meant, but a quick Google and my answer was found. These were all my new photos from this year that I had imported into the Photos app, but not into the Photos database. Make sense? So how do you discover all the photos that are referenced. Well, the Photos app now has smart albums, so simply create a smart album showing all referenced photos. I then highlighted the whole lot, went file, consolidate and 5 mins later the job was done.

I now have to see how long it takes for my photos to upload to iCloud. Once this is completed, I will have nearly everything in the iCloud.

And then my LG G4 shows I have a notification from Google Photos. A new story had been created of my trip to Berlin, completely automatically, adding full names of the places I visited and more. The story is so well put together, I could not have done it better myself. At IFA, Google Photos even identified which hall I was on when a photo was taken. Genius.

Someone tell me why I am moving to Apple again?

Updated – Well since 11pm (its now 6.07am) only 37 photos and 2 video clips have uploaded. Not even a dent on the 4,000 photos/videos needed to be uploaded!