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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...
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.
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?- Thank you so very much for your kind reply. It certainly very disappointing to know netgear failed to deliver such a critical feature.
As a workaround, I tentatively manually download all the shared album pictures to a local album and link it to the canvas. of course it’s not convenient and created duplicate copies on my phone…but it works. So the problem was certainly about the shared album setting and I really hope netgear can look into it asap. Thanks again!Netgear Support are still working on this issue - they acknowledged it was an issue when I followed up last week.