Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
I'd say you are part of the 0.001% of all iPhone customers who has never recorded videos on an iPhone. Again that's a very niche group that Apple doesn't want to spend engineering resources on.
I doubt it would be difficult to give people the option of syncing 30 days/1000 photos rather than the entire library. There are many people that don’t record video on phones.
 
I doubt it would be difficult to give people the option of syncing 30 days/1000 photos rather than the entire library. There are many people that don’t record video on phones.

"difficult" could mean anything. nearly impossible to implement? no. is it a constant drain on engineering hours to keep this maintained, especially when they have a new headset platform to which they would need to bring that feature over? sure.

it's easy to say Apple is rich so they can just hire more and more engineers but in reality, due to many factors, it's just not wise to continue.
 
  • Disagree
Reactions: merrygoround
this doesn't make sense to me. you mean *you* are transferring them over if you wanted to keep it. also you need to manually manage your videos. you're doing a ton of work to which plenty of alternative services exist that don't involve the cloud.
I really don't need the cloud and would be fine with AirDrop, I just want the whole thing to be automatic. I take photos during the day, and when I get home, I just want to go through them on my mac. Having to manually select 50 photos (trying to keep in mind which ones I've already transferred over), then sending them to myself over airdrop, waiting for the transfer to complete, then importing them into Photos, then deleting the originals, is tedious especially if I want to do it every single day. Would be great if this just happened in the background without asking me. My Photo Stream did exactly this. iCloud Photos is overkill for my needs and would force me to upgrade to a more expensive tier because I have a huge library (which only grows). But there is no other automatic solution.
 
I really don't need the cloud and would be fine with AirDrop, I just want the whole thing to be automatic. I take photos during the day, and when I get home, I just want to go through them on my mac. Having to manually select 50 photos (trying to keep in mind which ones I've already transferred over), then sending them to myself over airdrop, waiting for the transfer to complete, then importing them into Photos, then deleting the originals, is tedious especially if I want to do it every single day. Would be great if this just happened in the background without asking me. My Photo Stream did exactly this. iCloud Photos is overkill for my needs and would force me to upgrade to a more expensive tier because I have a huge library (which only grows). But there is no other automatic solution.
this is really easy to do in Shortcuts

Add action to select All Photos that are not favorited, add an Airdrop option (you'll need to enable "Allow Sharing Large Amounts of Data" in Settings.app), then modify all photos to be favorited.

Then you can add this action on the homescreen.

Now it's just a few taps every time you want to sync to your home computer. You can probably even automatically trigger this every time you arrive at home. Works with video too.

On the Mac, you can setup Automator to watch a folder and auto import the photos to photos library.
 
All my family members are asking this:

Will ending my photo stream will affect shared albums (which uses iCloud without a paid plan).

Anyone know?

I too have been using My Photo Stream to sync photos to all my devices without paying a subscription fee since day one.

Bummer.
 
I guess the good news is this move forced me to look at alternatives.

Turns out, Amazon Prime comes with free unlimited full res cloud storage for photos, and automatic uploads from my iOS devices……so that achieves a similar function for free since we already have Prime for other reasons.

So far it seems like I can rely on the Prime Photos app to have uploaded everything each day to the cloud, and I can see it / get it from any other connected device.

It isn't QUITE like Photostream in that the photos don't magically download to my other devices, from what I can see, but as long as I have an internet connection, it feels ALMOST as fast to access the photos from other devices.

Whats the privacy on Amazon Prime Photos?

I'm pretty sure if Steve saw iCloud photo library, he would have turned off photostream a long time ago.

Photostream doesn't even work with video and if you took a sensitive photo that you didn't mean to take, you'd have to delete in 2 places which confuses a lot of people. It's not so simple and not so convenient. If you edited a photo, the edits don't sync either.

Actually, I found it did delete the photo from the stream if I deleted it from the photo album
 
All my family members are asking this:

Will ending my photo stream will affect shared albums (which uses iCloud without a paid plan).

Anyone know?

I too have been using My Photo Stream to sync photos to all my devices without paying a subscription fee since day one.

Bummer.
No. Shared albums completely different thing
 
"difficult" could mean anything. nearly impossible to implement? no. is it a constant drain on engineering hours to keep this maintained, especially when they have a new headset platform to which they would need to bring that feature over? sure.

it's easy to say Apple is rich so they can just hire more and more engineers but in reality, due to many factors, it's just not wise to continue.
Its a beneficial feature. They are removing functionality. I do not need to store the last 20 years of photos in the cloud - that is being forced now if you want to have limited syncing. It frustrates me to see people cheering along the removal of features and increased costs for everyone - over and over again in apples case. Youre right - Apple is rich, and I personally dont care if they are a little less rich. As customers we should be holding them to account. There should always be an option that does not involve forcing customers to store their photos in the cloud if they want syncing. I do pay for storage already, and my photo album would comfortably fit - but its the principle of it. I do not want my entire album in the cloud and I cant see how it would be difficult to implement something that has been running for years now.
 
Its a beneficial feature. They are removing functionality. I do not need to store the last 20 years of photos in the cloud - that is being forced now if you want to have limited syncing. It frustrates me to see people cheering along the removal of features and increased costs for everyone - over and over again in apples case. Youre right - Apple is rich, and I personally dont care if they are a little less rich. As customers we should be holding them to account. There should always be an option that does not involve forcing customers to store their photos in the cloud if they want syncing. I do pay for storage already, and my photo album would comfortably fit - but its the principle of it. I do not want my entire album in the cloud and I cant see how it would be difficult to implement something that has been running for years now.
The answer is the same every time; take your business away from Apple.
 
Its a beneficial feature. They are removing functionality. I do not need to store the last 20 years of photos in the cloud - that is being forced now if you want to have limited syncing.
No. You have the option of AirDropping. Shortcuts makes it incredibly easy to AirDrop only new photos. You are not being forced to do the cloud solution.

It frustrates me to see people cheering along the removal of features and increased costs for everyone

It frustrates me that a niche group is advocating for sucking up precious engineering hours that could be better spent benefitting the majority instead of an incredibly minor group.

There should always be an option that does not involve forcing customers to store their photos in the cloud

AirDrop. Again you're not being forced to move to iCloud photos. Shortcuts can even ping you when you're home and suggest you tap to AirDrop photos. Only takes you a few minutes to setup
 
When you wipe out a Mac or get a new one, you pulls down everything in minute? Do you mean your documents and desktop? Because it's currently not possible to backup up a whole Mac system using iCloud. I wish that would be possible, like on iOS and iPadOS.
More or less. My laptop was stolen a while back. When my replacement arrived I basically only had to log into iCloud, install a few apps that are not in the Mac App Store and retrieve some big files that are not in iCloud from Time Machine or Backblaze (basically only media, virtual machines and my Lightroom library) to be back up and running exactly where I was in less than an hour.

Of course there was some tweaking of settings in the following weeks of the things I haven't managed to point to iCloud, but even most of that is there, either as notes or as links to actual config files.
 
The answer is the same every time; take your business away from Apple.
When you have been exclusively an apple user your whole working life that is much easier said than done. As apple knows well. But I have started to make the switch over the last few years - moving to a windows work laptop. I prefer macOS, but not at any cost.
 
When you have been exclusively an apple user your whole working life that is much easier said than done. As apple knows well. But I have started to make the switch over the last few years - moving to a windows work laptop. I prefer macOS, but not at any cost.
It’s only difficult because we chose to intertwine our lives very closely with these companies for the convenience.

We could all live a lot more detached from these companies if we were prepared to do things the hard way (no cloud syncing, manually managing everything across multiple devices etc).
 
No. You have the option of AirDropping. Shortcuts makes it incredibly easy to AirDrop only new photos. You are not being forced to do the cloud solution.



It frustrates me that a niche group is advocating for sucking up precious engineering hours that could be better spent benefitting the majority instead of an incredibly minor group.



AirDrop. Again you're not being forced to move to iCloud photos. Shortcuts can even ping you when you're home and suggest you tap to AirDrop photos. Only takes you a few minutes to setup
Precious engineering hours that Apple can well afford - and that have been well paid for over the years with the apple tax added to every single product. Using shortcuts is not the seamless solution that photostream offers.
 
Precious engineering hours that Apple can well afford - and that have been well paid for over the years with the apple tax added to every single product. Using shortcuts is not the seamless solution that photostream offers.
Unfortunately you’re going to need to find another solution; nothing anyone says here will prevent Apple from closing down photo stream.
 
Unfortunately you’re going to need to find another solution; nothing anyone says here will prevent Apple from closing down photo stream.
Sadly correct, but I would like them to implement control about which photos stay on the cloud - having everyone upload thousands of photos is just a ridiculous waste of storage - and frankly cant be very green using all of this additional server space. It should give you the option to select a time period.
 
Sadly correct, but I would like them to implement control about which photos stay on the cloud - having everyone upload thousands of photos is just a ridiculous waste of storage - and frankly cant be very green using all of this additional server space. It should give you the option to select a time period.
They’ve got to be stored somewhere, either locally or in the cloud so I guess we just need to delete all our photos :p
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: redAPPLE
Doesn't TimeMachine handle all of that?
Yes. But he didn’t mention TM, only iCloud got him up and running quickly. I’m not disputing that but if it’s possible I’m interested. There’s a lot of setup spent rebuilding app settings/prefs that are in the ~/Library. Drag and drops don’t (didn’t the last time I tried) work across the board as well. Bootable clones work, that’s what I use. Maybe that’s what iCloud uses. But that seems inconsistent with Apples view of cloning.
 
Precious engineering hours that Apple can well afford
re-read what i said about "it's easy to say Apple is rich so they can just hire more and more engineers but in reality, due to many factors, it's just not wise to continue.".

i'm out. obviously you're not going to listen.
 
Photostream seemlessly integrated the iPhone and the iPad into the Mac ecosystem. I never had to think about it. Photos simply showed up everywhere. On business trips, even in other countries, I could take photos and have them show up on the Apple TV for my kids to see while I was away. Photos were backed up on my home computer. It functioned as an extension of the operating system and represented an element of Apple's core philosophy: integrate technology so that it's as easy to use as an appliance like a toaster. By charging for a service like this one, it diminishes its value and disrupts the ecosystem. When people asked me what I thought, because I'm a veteran of the IT industry and an Apple advocate, I said, "Screw Apple. There are better services available like Adobe Lightroom. You'll get a better product and better service for your money." And for the first time since 2007, I can see a compelling reason to switch to the Android. Lightroom runs on it and an Android costs less money. Google's Cloud services are the same price but vastly superior to Apple's iCloud. Additionally Google Docs have become the professional standard across industries. If Apple decides to turn every integrated service into a money maker, then I'm going to look to the marketplace for solutions with better features at a better price. There are other companies hungry for a spot in the ecosystem and will eagerly push Apple out.
 
  • Like
Reactions: avalon68 and ticzon
So... with Photo Streaming about to be discontinued... what options are most people going with?

I was hoping Apple would offer some type of new pricing structure to use iCloud with more storage size options - but that doesn't seem to be happening

I've also looked at iDrive and Backblaze - not sure which I prefer yet...🤔

Thoughts?

Thanks,

SparkyCanada
 
Last edited:
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.