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Apple's 'My Photo Stream' Service Shuts Down on Wednesday, Here's What You Need to Do

iStorm said:
The difference is that Photo Stream does not require any iCloud storage space, nor do you need your photo library stored in the cloud. You could be on the free 5GB plan with no space let, yet still be able to sync all the photos you took.
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But wouldn't you need to manually copy it into your local library or else it would be deleted after 30 days?
 
iStorm said:
The difference is that Photo Stream does not require any iCloud storage space, nor do you need your photo library stored in the cloud. You could be on the free 5GB plan with no space let, yet still be able to sync all the photos you took.
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photostream doesn't sync HEIC. not even sure if it'll sync 48MP proraw formats too. no live photos either.

and considering more and more people are taking video, photostream won't even let you do that.

even worse is if you took an embarrassing photo, you'd need to manually delete it from photostream and photo library.

you're better off setting up a shortcut for one button sync whenever you want.
 
charliesixtwo said:
This is one change I really hate.

Photo Stream "just worked" without additional cost or confusion.
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Blatantly false. Doesn't sync HEIC images. Not even sure if it syncs 48MP RAW photos. No live photos/videos.

Confusion? Absolutely confusing. My mom had it on and was confused as to why she needed to delete a sensitive photo from two places.
 
I like the photo stream idea as long as it doesn't count towards your data. The problem I usually find is if you sync your photos in iCloud it takes up all your data so I leave it off and manually transfer my photos to my Mac.
 
tripsync said:
Blatantly false. Doesn't sync HEIC images. Not even sure if it syncs 48MP RAW photos. No live photos/videos.

Confusion? Absolutely confusing. My mom had it on and was confused as to why she needed to delete a sensitive photo from two places.
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did you even read my post?
and for your information, it did sync a lower resolution version of heic images.
It was a nice, no-cost way of having a pic taken on one device show up on other devices - in an album very clearly named “my photo stream”, in addition to the “recents” folder on the original device.

And it didn’t need to be deleted in 2 places - on deleting the original pic on the device it was taken on, it would warn along the lines of “this will be deleted from all other devices”.
 
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charliesixtwo said:
did you even read my post?
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I did, but it goes against your "just worked" argument.

charliesixtwo said:
And it didn’t need to be deleted in 2 places - on deleting the original pic on the device it was taken on, it would warn along the lines of “this will be deleted from all other devices”.
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Not when my mom used it. I distinctly remember telling her to just delete the original over the phone but she complained it was still on her Mac. I drove to her house to check and realized you needed to delete the original and the photo stream version. I turned photo stream off for her.

Now maybe they changed in the later versions but it was certainly confusing when they first introduced it.
 
Feek said:
Mine is.

My iMac has my entire library on it in full quality, all other devices are set to optimise storage.
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Mine too. Question was what’s the difference between Photo Stream and iCloud Photos regarding the sync and auto adding to your main library. The real answer is about $120/yr in the US. Otherwise sure, it’s the same. :confused:
 
Don’t forget, if you subscribe to amazon prime they give
unlimited photo storage. if you have Microsoft 365, you get a terabyte of Onedrive space
 
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ersan191 said:
It's not exactly the same as My Photo Stream but you can just turn on automatic wifi syncing with your iPhone on your Mac/PC and enable photo syncing. Your phone has to be on the same network and the auto sync isn't instant (manual is) but otherwise it's pretty similar.
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Are you sure that this works? In my own testing it only works on the other direction, i.e. Mac to iPhone.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
Connect a big disc to your iDevice and dump them to it? I'm confident this will work.

Connect a big disc and your iDevice to your Mac and then dump the photos to the big disc? I can't recall for sure if you can direct dump in this way but I think it can work.

Else, download chunks at a time to your Mac and then offload them from Mac to external drive until you get them all offloaded.
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I cannot directly copy them from iPhoto because I don't have all the originals locally stored (lack of space). And downloading them on the browser from iCloud.com can only be done in chunks. I was wondering if there was a way to download them from iCloud or something without having to manually select them, wait for the chunck to be fully downloaded, and then select the next chunk. Especially because, since it is a backup, I would like to store them on a network disk. So the downloads of each portion will take AGES... From iCloud through Mac to external network drive...
 
I never understood what this streaming was for. I enabled it from day one, and disabled it only recently from when i began receiving mails from apple about its shutting down. Nothing changed. For me is only a pointless options slider less.
 
To chime in, I was an active user for 3/4 of its existence, and this service being reliable never failed me. The auto-synchronization without having to worry about storage limits or not having a photo turn up on all my devices the moment the device finds itself in the Internet coverage area was most appetizing.
 
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If you're technically inclined you can write a script emulating My Photo Stream in your language of choice by including the shell utility icloudpd that lets you access iCloud Photos from the macOS and Windows command line. With it, you can list and download your iCloud photos to your computer.

iCloud photos downloader CLI (GitHub)

There's even a Find My Phone command line counterpart named icloud, in addition to icloudpd, under the Releases section:

icloudpd and icloud (GitHub) - Releases
 
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subi257 said:
The whole PhotoStream will be gone and you will need to use iClould photo. It does use space on you 5GB free cloud storage, but will be there permanently. Also, the syncing is more reliable.
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Which means if you have hundreds of gigs, you have to pay even if you only want it sync and don’t care about it being online.
 
It's officially gone now. Setting has disappeared but if you search setting for stream it still shows a result.
Interesting how Apple can turn features on or off on our devices without an update. :rolleyes:
 
Well this sucks. My Photo Stream didn’t count against your storage limits, IIRC.

Also, this morning after its alreday shut down is the first I learned about it from an email from Apple.

this was the main way I was synching photos from my phone to my Mac.

Now I guess I’m back to manually synching my iPhone and other device photos to Mac. Since my photos library on the Mac is probably 60,000 photos and videos, no way I‘m turning on iCloud Photos for the Mac.
 
fatTribble said:
I’m in a similar situation although my 4K videos are probably far fewer than yours. I can still get everything into iCloud but my stuff exceeds the 1TB iPhone to keep everything local.

I really wish we had controls over what goes into iCloud and what is always on the device. Like you said if you could limit iCloud to photos, that would help many.

For Optimize Photos, I’d love to have all photos on device but keep videos only in iCloud. Or let me choose albums to keep on device.

There are so many opportunities for powerful new functionality with just a few settings.
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Yeah, it would be great to be able to specify an album that gets synched to icloud, amd media type.
 
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ersan191 said:
I mean, this post explains that it was around for 12 years.

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It's not exactly the same as My Photo Stream but you can just turn on automatic wifi syncing with your iPhone on your Mac/PC and enable photo syncing. Your phone has to be on the same network and the auto sync isn't instant (manual is) but otherwise it's pretty similar.
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Do you have to be signed-in to your account on the mac for this to work? We have a shared family mac with multiple user accounts.

Often my partner’s account is the one signed-in as they use it more often. Would my iPhone photos synch, in the background? Or would I need to sign her out and sign-in to my account?

Does it work if we are all signed-out?

We have 4 family members all with iDevices, would it bog down our wifi and Mac if they are all trying to synch at the same time?
 
ersan191 said:
I mean, this post explains that it was around for 12 years.

--

It's not exactly the same as My Photo Stream but you can just turn on automatic wifi syncing with your iPhone on your Mac/PC and enable photo syncing. Your phone has to be on the same network and the auto sync isn't instant (manual is) but otherwise it's pretty similar.
Click to expand...
Hello. I am hoping you will see this message. I just got off the phone with Apple and the automatic wifi syncing I believe you are referencing is not a two-way street. You can currently only sync from Mac to iPhone this way. You can not sync from iPhone to Mac. Please let me know if I am wrong because I would love to be able to do this. Or do you have a reference for how to actually achieve this? I believe those of us who want to be constantly automatically syncing photos from our phones to mac have little choice outside of iCloud. I've got 40GB of Photos/Videos and I preferred not to have that much space taken on my iCloud storage, so it seems I'm back to just periodically doing a photo dump. Please let me know if you something we don't know or if the Apple specialist I was speaking to was BSing me! Thanks.
 
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