iCloud Photos & Photo Stream

[sdilley14]

Right now I have my phone set up where I'll take a photo, upload it to a general "All Photos" Photo Stream (so the picture isn't stored locally and taking up space), then delete the photo. However, I do like the idea of the iCloud Photos app and being able to just log into my iCloud account and view all of my photos.

So this is kind of a three-pronged question.

1. Does anyone know what the storage saving % is when using the "optimize for storage" setting in the Photos app? Ex. I have 1GB of full resolution photos, how much space would that take up on the phone in "optimized" mode?

2. How would I go about taking all of my photos from my Photo Stream and putting them in the iCloud Photos app? Would it just be a matter of downloading them back on to my phone/MBP then uploading them to iCloud from there?

3. How would it work as far as taking a picture and sharing the "full resolution" version on Facebook if I have the "storage optimization" mode turned on? Right now when I share a photo on Facebook it just takes the picture that is stored locally on my phone and uploads it to FB. From my understanding, if I'm uploading a locally stored picture with the storage optimization mode turned on, I would be uploading a smaller/lesser quality version of my original photo?

With a 16GB phone my storage options are limited - but I do like having photos stored locally so I can quickly and easily text them to friends. For that purpose it wouldn't really matter if I had full-res or "optimized" photos.

Edit: I just realized this. Doesn't Photo Stream sort of act in a similar way already, where is stores an "optimized" version of your images on your device for quick viewing, and when you want to view/edit/send a "full res" version of your photo it has to temprarily download it to your device? Something along those lines?

 

[BrettDS]

1. Does anyone know what the storage saving % is when using the "optimize for storage" setting in the Photos app? Ex. I have 1GB of full resolution photos, how much space would that take up on the phone in "optimized" mode?

My wife has about a 27G photo library and her iPad is configured to optimize space. Photos takes up about 2G on that device. I'm sure there's no exact formula, but hopefully that can help give you a ballpark number

2. How would I go about taking all of my photos from my Photo Stream and putting them in the iCloud Photos app? Would it just be a matter of downloading them back on to my phone/MBP then uploading them to iCloud from there?

When you enable iPL it will take everything in your camera roll and upload it to iPL. You would need to get the photos from your photostream back into your camera roll somehow. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the best way to do that is

3. How would it work as far as taking a picture and sharing the "full resolution" version on Facebook if I have the "storage optimization" mode turned on? Right now when I share a photo on Facebook it just takes the picture that is stored locally on my phone and uploads it to FB. From my understanding, if I'm uploading a locally stored picture with the storage optimization mode turned on, I would be uploading a smaller/lesser quality version of my original photo?

When you view a photo on the device or share a photo it will automatically download the full resolution version from the cloud.

Edit: I just realized this. Doesn't Photo Stream sort of act in a similar way already, where is stores an "optimized" version of your images on your device for quick viewing, and when you want to view/edit/send a "full res" version of your photo it has to temprarily download it to your device? Something along those lines?

Not really. Photostream stores a full version of the photo in the cloud, but that full version is only accessible from a computer. iOS devices will pull down a slightly more compressed version whether it's for viewing or sharing or whatever.

 

[sdilley14]

My wife has about a 27G photo library and her iPad is configured to optimize space. Photos takes up about 2G on that device. I'm sure there's no exact formula, but hopefully that can help give you a ballpark number



When you enable iPL it will take everything in your camera roll and upload it to iPL. You would need to get the photos from your photostream back into your camera roll somehow. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the best way to do that is


When you view a photo on the device or share a photo it will automatically download the full resolution version from the cloud.



Not really. Photostream stores a full version of the photo in the cloud, but that full version is only accessible from a computer. iOS devices will pull down a slightly more compressed version whether it's for viewing or sharing or whatever.

Great response, thank you very much!

I just accessed my Photo Stream from my phone and manually selected each photo and downloaded them to my Camera Roll. From there the phone just automatically uploaded all of the photos to the iCloud Photo app. Worked quickly and flawlessly. Now I have all photos stored on one single camera roll on my phone, slected photos saved to specific folders, and all photos and folders are viewable in the iCloud Photo app. Awesome.