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Well I've got photos and videos from my iphone to show up on the iCloud website, but I'm a bit wary of what's actually being stored, because I'm clearly not seeing full resolution photos and videos on iCloud.com (as the comments on Pocket Lint confirm).

Perhaps by the time its out of beta it'll be functional, but for the moment this is all much less intuitive and reassuring than Dropbox/Carousel for automated cloud backup of photos and videos. Given I now have over a terabyte of Dropbox space (new 1TB increase combined with previous referral space etc), Apple's offering is really going to have to improve to give a compelling reason to switch!
 
What I don't understand is:
Why does iCloud not allow you to view pictures on your Mac or iPhone from past devices.
I have 4.5g of photos but I cant view what any of those are on either device with photo stream turned on.
I'm basically ready to delete "my photos" so I can backup important stuff like phone numbers and the sort
 
I now have the ability to enable icloud photo beta.

If I turn it on, every image on my iPhone/iPad, will get stored on the cloud and keep a little size thumbnail on the device.

What happen when you take the photo and then it uses photo stream to stored them in iPhoto (on MacBook) and aperture on (iMac). Will they still get completely downloaded in the softwares?

Is it only for iPad and iPhones? I suppose it doesn't put a thumbnail in aperture or iPhoto does it?

Thanks
 
I don't understand iCloud Photo Library

Is it just me or does the optimize setting do absolutely nothing? Originally I turned on iCloud photo and set it to keep original. I later turned it off and then turned it back on and chose optimize. The space on my phone remained the same.

I used the Investigator app to look at the photo meta data and the photos were full resolution (3264x2448) rather than the lower resolution version like with My PhotoStream, so it looks like existing photos are simply left there.

Does the optimize setting only apply to downloaded photos from other devices?
 
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Right now, my father has photos taken on is ipad synced with Dropbox. He has found dropbox to be kind of messy and a pain to organize/sort photos online and share with people.

I was going to suggest this icloud photo library to him. But if he sets it up on his mac and ipad, reading this thread, if he deletes photos on his ipad, but not his mac, they will also be gone from the icloud?
 
I think people are forgetting that iCloud Photo Library is still in Beta mode meaning things are not going to work as planned.

We need to give it time for these bugs to be ironed out!!
 
On my iMac I have 375 pictures in my Photo Stream (shared iCloud) - I have zero pictures in iCloud Photos when i go to the www.icloud.com/#photos it says add photos from your devices? How do I get my photos from my iMac to show up on my iPhone or iPad? Or when I go to iCloud www.icloud.com/#photos why does it says my iPhoto library is empty? I am not worried about the Photos I have them backed up just trying to figure how to get them accross all my devices a iPad a iMac and a iPhone and have them on iCloud.

I took all my pictures out of my iPhoto and My Photo stream and saved them to a picture folder on my iMac.

When I take a picture from my ios device it puts them in all the right place I have them across all my devices and can see them on iCloud Photos.

Am I able to put the pictures that I saved on my iMac back to iPhoto and get them to work across all devices?
 
Is it just me or does the optimize setting do absolutely nothing? Originally I turned on iCloud photo and set it to keep original. I later turned it off and then turned it back on and chose optimize. The space on my phone remained the same.

I used the Investigator app to look at the photo meta data and the photos were full resolution (3264x2448) rather than the lower resolution version like with My PhotoStream, so it looks like existing photos are simply left there.

Does the optimize setting only apply to downloaded photos from other devices?

I don't have a solid answer yet to the optimization but I'm working on it. I thought I would share what I have observed here.

Wife and daughter both have iPads and iPhones, both on 8.1 and both have iCPL activated. Both devices optimize the photos as expected.

I have iPhone on 8.1 but still use an original iPad that cannot be updated past 5.1.1 (roughly). My phone will not optimize the photos and my theory is that because my iPad is connected to iCloud the iCloud "system" is aware of the fact my iPad can never use iCPL. I think it does this to have available the full size photos for Photostream if I were to use that option. I can't think of any other reason why at this point my photos would not optimize.

Funny thing is, after playing with all this and seeing how it works on the wife and daughters phones, I'm not 100% sure I want to use the option. On the one hand, it saves space on the photos I don't open often but at the same time, it slows the process of looking at the photos I do want to see and share. As someone above posted, it might be nice to have an option that optimizes photos older than 30 days and leaves the recent photos full size. I may in the end go back to my old system of no iCPL, auto upload to OneDrive and store a copy on my PC which is backed up to an external drive. It was working fine.
 
There is an option whereby you can choose to keep the low res versions on your phone or the high res ones.



.....probably a bug and the reason why iCloud Photo Library is in Beta.



All 'cloud' services operate it this way though don't they? Delete stuff fro the cloud and the same things get deleted from the cloud enabled devices, and vice versa.

Personally, I don't see a problem with this. If you want to keep photos on your phone but not in the cloud (or vice versa), just turn iCloud Photo Library off - problem solved.

I suppose yes, but what I want is a separation on my phone between the camera app and on iCloud. I want to choose which photos go up, which ones don't, but I don't want that choice to allowed only by the delete photo button. This is nuanced but important for me in terms of pictures as a workflow. I can work around iCloud photos, but that defeats the benefit. Sometimes too simple is not the best approach. I think in this case what makes iCloud photos challenging is that Apple has made all of the decisions on work flow, and that's that, no flexibility. iCloud is one big bin, and all phone photos go there by default when it is used. Maybe this is best for most users. We'll see.
 
My understanding on how optimize is supposed to work is similar to how My PhotoStream works.

When photos are uploaded to My PhotoStream, they upload full resolution. When they download though to an iPhone or iPad, a lower resolution version is downloaded. This isn't a thumbnail, it's a "full sized" photo, just at a smaller resolution since viewing an 8 Megapixel photo on a small screen is overkill. When viewing PhotoStream photos, nothing needs to be downloaded since it already downloaded. It's the same with iCloud Photo Sharing. Videos do need to download though.

The way iCloud Photo Library should work with optimize set to on is to upload the photos, delete the existing one off the device and then download a lower resolution version. At that point viewing a photo should be instantaneous. There should be no reason to download the full resolution when viewing a photo as that defeats the purpose. Videos would have to download, assuming they aren't also shrunk (I've read optimize replaces 1080p video with 720p).

All of that should be independent of My PhotoStream, though it would have to wait for the upload to both iCloud Photo Library and My PhotoStream. Hopefully Apple would just do the upload once and copy it on their end. I did see something about photos and videos being still available for 30 days after turning off iCloud Photo Library so maybe it shares storage with My PhotoStream.
 
so i have a folder of pics in iPhoto on my mac that i want to upload to the iCloud library. The help section on the iCloud photo web app says to click upload and select the album/pics to upload.

I cannot see an upload button to click however!!

Anyone??
 
Does anyone know why if I turn on iCloud photo stream it wants to delete all my snyc'd photos and videos? I am staying away because of this, hope I'm just missing something.
 
Does anyone know why if I turn on iCloud photo stream it wants to delete all my snyc'd photos and videos? I am staying away because of this, hope I'm just missing something.

The photos and videos its talking about are the ones you sync from your desktop. It will stop doing this because going forward your photos would come from the cloud versus your local machine.
 
what happens if i have 2 iphones (one 5s and one 6) that have both on the photos folder the same photos, the 5s is left on 7.1.2 , the 6 is on 8 , i decide to use the icloud photo library on the 6 and after some months i take the 5s to the ios8 also. will i have my cloud full of duplicate photos? will somehow merge them? will delete everything? anyone with the same problem / issue that i have?
 
The photos and videos its talking about are the ones you sync from your desktop. It will stop doing this because going forward your photos would come from the cloud versus your local machine.

So, the photos or videos it wants to delete would just be moved to the cloud? Or do I have to add those deleted photos to the cloud from my computer?
 
so i have a folder of pics in iPhoto on my mac that i want to upload to the iCloud library. The help section on the iCloud photo web app says to click upload and select the album/pics to upload.

I cannot see an upload button to click however!!

Anyone??

iPhoto is a dead product. Don't rely on any of its functions from now on.
 
So, the photos or videos it wants to delete would just be moved to the cloud? Or do I have to add those deleted photos to the cloud from my computer?

No. They're deleted from your phone, so make sure you have a backup first.

I've asked a question about just how to get pictures from my Mac (which I use iPhoto though iTunes to sync photos) onto iCloud. I was told to download an app, which seems like more hassle than it's worth.
 
So, the photos or videos it wants to delete would just be moved to the cloud? Or do I have to add those deleted photos to the cloud from my computer?

You would have to get them from your computer to the cloud. At the moment the only way I know to do that is through your phone or iPad. I used an app in the store to do it. It copied my photos onto my device which then uploaded to the cloud.

The only reason I have decided to do this (BTW) is for the sorting and search features built into the phone. With my photos on another service like OneDrive I could sort into folders but I really don't want the manual labor. I just want a big folder full of photos that are indexed for search. Having them on my device with the integrated GPS tag makes these photos searchable.

If it were not for this one feature, I would have move on from iCPL already.
 
iPhoto is a dead product. Don't rely on any of its functions from now on.

Only mentioned iPhoto as that is where i have the pics on my Mac.

My question is how do i upload pics from my mac to iCloud library??
 
I honk he means, the icloud should serve as a backup and container for all images instead of just a mirror of your device. He means if the the cloud has the exact same images on your phone then what's the point of having it in the cloud.


well he must be thinking it's iMirror Photo Library or iBackup Photo Library, not iCloud Photo Library.

The point being again: "cloud" accessible via MANY devices, anywhere, anytime - since the data lives on the cloud.

I still think it makes perfect sense. Someones earlier comment about it behaving the same as a CONTACT in contacts.app is a perfect comparison..

Yes we have all this "Stream" stuff right now, and for some reason no DESKTOP app until 2015 - but it's clear and clean a solution to a real problem. I couldn't be more happy about it.
 
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It doesn't work well enough to be of any use. Very poor showing for Apple. I got my ipad uploaded to it but the phone never did. If only one device works with it it's worse than useless. I disabled it and went back to the way I had it before. anyone who tries it should definitely not let it optimize and remove their originals. I didn't fall for that so my originals are still OK. This supposedly beta product is more like an alpha and should be labeled as such to make people more wary of trying it in the first place.

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iPhoto is a dead product. Don't rely on any of its functions from now on.

Very bad idea for them to discontinue iPhoto. Unlike Cloud photo library it actually works.
 
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