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Forum Discussion
How Do Linked Albums Update?
My platform is iOS. I’ve done a search of this forum on “linked albums” and read several posts about linked albums. As I read it, it seems that there might be an issue with linked albums updating fro...
Linked albums are my next feature to experiment with - I have an iPhone and iCloud setup. I'll report back...
I now have some linked albums in my Meural library. These link to my iCloud albums and also to shared iCloud albums I am a member of (shared to me by another iCloud user). If I add or delete a photo in one of my shared albums in iCloud Photos, or the person sharing their album to me makes a change, these are reflected in my Meural library. It's quite quick for my iCloud to reflect changes to shared albums to me (less than a minute), but the Meural app seems to take a couple of minutes to sync, so it's refresh rate is much lower than iCloud's, but it does sync.
I have another issue with linking to iCloud shared albums that I have described in another post. If the photos are JPEG then it works. If Apple HEIF and after a version of iOS 15, then the linked album is empty and cannot be synced. It goes through the download process but never refreshes. What is odd is if I save a shared album photo that is HEIF to my Photo library, make no changes so it remains as HEIF, I can then manually add it to a Meural library, so the HEIF format is not an issue for manual uploads and only linked albums. All my own photos in iCloud are HEIF and upload fine, manually and to linked albums. It's just linked albums that are shared to me in iCloud and that have been created in HEIF from a particular date when iOS was a variant of version 15.
Hello Jeffgear,
Thank you for your response!
I understand that you are having issues with your linked albums on your Meural Canvas.
Please PM the following information so I can endorse you to our support team:
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I look forward to hearing from you!
Best,
Kevin
Community Team
This support case is still open and being looked into. I have updated other similar posts about this issue with linked albums to iCloud shared albums with HEIF images that has stopped working since an iOS 15 version.
- Just bought it for a 10th anniversary gift a few days ago. Was very excited but now facing an exact problem about the shared album after spending hours to select the photos…wondering if there are any solutions or workaround being identified? Grateful for any help. Thanks
- What a lovely anniversary present idea! The Meural is a great gadget despite the HEIF/HEIC bug and I’m hopeful Netgear will resolve this.
A potential workaround is to convert all the photos to JPEG. This means having to re import them back into Photos. The downside is the duplication of images unless you delete the originals. The other downside is the time and hassle with this clunky workaround. Also the sync with the original sharer still won’t work as their source images are HEIC.
Alternatively you or the sharer could change the camera to save in JPEG mode then no workaround is required to get them into Meural. The downside here is HEIF format is better than the JPEG in some areas and it’s a bit much to expect people to change their camera or phones to suit you.
My older photos in HEIF upload and sync from shared albums fine - it’s just ones from 2022 onwards, presumably after some change somewhere. Perhaps Apple changed the format specification and Meural hasn’t worked out how to be compatible again, or Meural changed something and broke their API compatibility, or Apple are licensing the format or restricting the API and Meural hasn’t joined the club.
It’s taking a long time to resolve for sure. It is tardy of Meural to not at least confirm when the fix is likely to reach the top of their to-fix list.- Just confirming the issue is still present after iOS update 16.3.1 - a family member who successfully shared an iCloud album to me in early 2022 has this week added some more new family photos to the album. All other family members who are members of this shared album received a notification from Apple Photos and can see these new photos in their Photos app. However Meural has failed to resync and update the linked album with these additional photos. All original and new photos are HEIC format but something have changed last year such that Meural is not able to upload newer images in HEIC format but older HEIC images before a certain unknown date are fine and remain in the linked album in Meural and display on the Canvas. I have not tried unlinking and re linking this iCloud shared album as I don’t want to lose all these images from Meural if they fail to re sync, but a separate test does confirm older HEIC still sync ok.
Has anyone else noticed any developments?
