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Someone please explain Photo Stream vs iCloud Photos!?

Y

yalag

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Original poster
Nov 18, 2007
1,448
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I've used photo streams for years. It's syncs all the photos I've taken to all other devices. It was something easy to understand.

What on earth is iCloud photos? It syncs all photos to all devices? Again?!

Do I use both? Or is it the new version of photo stream?
 
Photo Stream syncs only pics taken on idevices, not all pictures.
iCloud Photos syncs everything in pictures, including the ones copied from you Mac/PC on idevices.
 
Photostream is a rolling snapshot of photos (1,000 photos over the last 30 days) and doesn't take any space from your iCloud storage
iCloud Photo Library is all your photos and comes out of your iCloud storage
 
yalag said:
I've used photo streams for years. It's syncs all the photos I've taken to all other devices. It was something easy to understand.

What on earth is iCloud photos? It syncs all photos to all devices? Again?!

Do I use both? Or is it the new version of photo stream?
Click to expand...

...no, you don't use both. You either use Photo Stream OR iCloud Photo Library.

Photo Stream will sync the pics taken on all your iDevices so that if you take a pic on your iPad, this same pic gets synced to your iPhone as well.

iCloud Photo Library will sync the pics you have taken on your iDevices and will upload them to the cloud. From the cloud (on a pc/mac), you can then add additional pics to the cloud, where they will then also sync back down to your iDevices. You can choose to keep just the low res pics on your iDevices and keep the high res versions in the cloud OR you can keep the full res pics on your iDevices as well.

Thats the way I understand it anyway............!

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DarrenUK said:
So if we have iCloud Photo Library (beta) selected then we should turn off icloud photostream?
Click to expand...

..yes!

If you turn iCloud Photo Library on, I don't think you will also have the Photo Stream option.
 
Dino F said:
...no, you don't use both. You either use Photo Stream OR iCloud Photo Library.

Photo Stream will sync the pics taken on all your iDevices so that if you take a pic on your iPad, this same pic gets synced to your iPhone as well.

iCloud Photo Library will sync the pics you have taken on your iDevices and will upload them to the cloud. From the cloud (on a pc/mac), you can then add additional pics to the cloud, where they will then also sync back down to your iDevices. You can choose to keep just the low res pics on your iDevices and keep the high res versions in the cloud OR you can keep the full res pics on your iDevices as well.

Thats the way I understand it anyway............!

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..yes!

If you turn iCloud Photo Library on, I don't think you will also have the Photo Stream option.
Click to expand...


No, Photo stream and iCloud photos are two different things that can both be activated at the same time, and they serve different purposes. See the post above you.
 
OSX doesn't have the new Photos.app at this time. Apple stated support for that app will happen in early 2015.

Until then, users with Mac computers (OSX) still need a wireless solution to get pictures from their iDevices to their Macs. Photostream is that solution (as it has always been).

If you only have iDevices then Photostream isn't necessary as IPL will sync all your pics and videos across them all. However, if you have a Mac, you can't natively access IPL because there is no Photos.app at this time (coming in early 2015).

When OSX updates in 2015 to include the new Photos.app, we should see Photostream disappear.
 
Then why did they keep photo stream??? It seems icloud photos is an upgrade
 
Not even sure I know how to ask this. All of my iPhone including photos/apps is already backed up on iCloud. Which is restored though iTunes when needed.

So how is that different from iCloud Photo Library?
 
For now Photostream is the only way to send photos wirelessly to iPhoto /Aperture.

Eventually those programs will go away and, sure, turn off Photostream then. But while they still exist it makes perfect sense to use both iCloud Photos (for use between iOS devices) and Photostream (for sending photos to a Mac) at the same time.

Heck, while iCloud Photos is in "beta" I'd consider it a bit foolish to NOT use Photosteram along with it! If this iCloud Photos thing eventually blows up and erases all my pictures I'll feel good knowing they'd already been safely sent to my Mac using Photostream.


As for the difference between the two, Photosteam sends while iCloud syncs. For example, with iCloud I can do an edit on a photo on my phone and that edit shows up on the photo on my iPad. I can then remove the edit from the photo on the iPad and it's removed on the phone's version too.

None of that would happen with Photostream. With that it would have sent the original to my Mac and then the edited version to my Mac and then those would have remained there if I erased them both from my phone.
 
All I know is, Apple needs to come up with a faster way to select multiple photos. If I take 100 photos on a given day and want to delete 50 of them the next day, it's 50 taps. Am I missing something?
 
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