Apple’s “My Photo Stream” is shutting down on July 26, 2023. My Photo Stream was Apple’s first attempt at allowing users to sync photos across all of their devices linked to a single iCloud account. Originally named “Photo Stream,” unveiled at WWDC on June 6, 2011 and released to the public with iOS 5 on October 12, 2011 (six days after Steve Jobs’ death on October 5th), the service came along with the basic iCloud service which allows users to store the most recent 1,000 photos on the iCloud servers for up to 30 days free of charge.
As part of this transition, new photo uploads to My Photo Stream from your devices will stop one month before, on June 26, 2023. Any photos uploaded to the service before that date will remain in iCloud for 30 days from the date of upload and will be available to any of your devices where My Photo Stream is currently enabled. By July 26, 2023, there will be no photos remaining in iCloud, and the service will be shut down.
Until June 26, 2023, My Photo Stream uploads your most recent photos (except Live Photos) so that you can view and import them to all of your devices. Photos are stored in My Photo Stream for 30 days. In contrast, iCloud Photos uploads all of your photos and videos to iCloud and keeps them up to date across your devices.
The photos in My Photo Stream are already stored on at least one of your devices, so as long as you have the device with your originals, you won’t lose any photos as part of this process. If a photo you want isn’t already in your library on a particular iPhone, iPad, or Mac, make sure that you save it to your library on that device.
Moving forward, iCloud Photos is the best way to keep the photos and videos you take up to date across all your devices and safely stored in iCloud.
How to save photos currently in My Photo Stream:
If your photos currently in My Photo Stream aren’t already in your library, you can save them to your device.
On your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:
1. Open Photos and tap Albums.
2. Tap My Photo Stream > Select.
3. Tap the photos that you want to save, then tap the Share button > Save Image.
On your Mac:
1. Open the Photos app, then open the My Photo Stream album.
2. Select any photos you want to save that aren’t currently in your photo library.
3. Drag them from the My Photo Stream album to your Library.
How to set up iCloud Photos:
You can turn on iCloud Photos on any iPhone with iOS 8.3 or later, iPad with iPadOS 8.3 or later, or Mac with OS X Yosemite or later. After that, you can view your photos and videos in the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, iCloud.com, and even sync them to a Windows PC using iCloud for Windows.
MacDailyNews Note: You can turn on iCloud Photos on any iPhone with iOS 8.3 or later, iPad with iPadOS 8.3 or later, or Mac with OS X Yosemite or later. After that, you can view your photos and videos in the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, iCloud.com, and even sync them to a Windows PC using iCloud for Windows.
Learn how to set up iCloud Photos on all of your devices here.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
I have actually found My Photo Stream to be unreliable. Sometimes pictures that I take with my iPhone would appear on my Mac almost immediately, and sometimes they would never migrate at all. Sometimes, I needed to kickstart the picture transfer process by deleting a photo from either my iPhone or my Mac, and then the remaining new photos will transfer. But I have been a Mac user for a very long time. I have a 102 GB photo library. I have no desire to store all of that on Apple’s servers (and to have to pay for the iCloud storage to maintain it) just so that new photos may transfer to my Mac. I may just get into the habit of plugging my iPhone into my Mac from time to time and then I will import the new photos.
Time will tell for how many Apple customers cough up the bucks for the upsell.
But knowing Apple, they’ve already run the surveys & financials and know it will be ‘enough’, so they won’t reverse course.
I no longer have the energy to keep up with the unmitigated barrage of changes Apple does to everything. This is probably just me. They have managed to make the System Settings window an unitelligible, Microsoftian nightmare now that they did away with the simple icons. Lists and lists and lists. All that one learns and remembers is discarded when they come in and start fucking up stuff like this.
I agree, Apple has some of the worst prompts I’ve ever seen, you’re rarely sure what switching something on or off will result in. I was horrified to realize a few years ago that iCloud photos shoves all of your photos into a huge pile and there’s no way to download just the images you took on a particular iphone for example. Forget downloading things from icloud.com, your metadata is gone and the “created” date is the day you downloaded the photo!! I turned off icloud photos, it’s shite. Regular downloads of your photos through image capture to an external drive organized your way is the only way to go.
Translation: no more (minor) free lunch from Apple for cloud-based transfers.
Of course, the dilemma for some of us is that the largest iCloud subscription that Apple offers is only 2TB ($10/month), and our Photos library is already exceeding this size.
As such, can’t use it even if I was willing to pay ~$120/yr.
Harkening back with fondness to Mobile Me. Things seems so simple, convenient and creatively conducive back then. Apple has become a “railroad” of sorts.
MobileMe was simpler but it didn’t work reliably either.
I gave up on this several years ago. It was a mess, never seemed to work like I needed it or wanted it to…. And as I recall, it wouldn’t upload vids from my phone. Worthless. I moved to doing everything on my Synology Server. After the initial investment, its free. I have a pretty fast symmetrical fiber internet at home, so even when on the road, I can easily access whatever I need/ want to.