- Apple is shutting down My Photo Stream on July 26th
- Learn how to save photos from My Photo Stream before the deadline
- Exploring options to move photos to iCloud Photos or a third-party service
Apple will be shutting down My Photo Stream in less than a week. Here’s how to make sure those photos are saved, and still shareable to all your devices, using iCloud Photos or an alternative service. When iCloud first launched back in 2011, there was no iCloud Photo Library yet to allow for easy syncing and sharing of photos you had stored on one of your devices with any of the others. Instead, Apple at that time offered My Photo Stream — a free way to make the most recent photos available via iCloud to your other devices.
From then until now, the service has worked pretty flawlessly, albeit with some notable drawbacks. My Photo Stream doesn’t support streaming videos, doesn’t support Live Photos, and only showed the most recent 30 days’ worth — or most recent 1,000, whichever was greater — of your photos. For many users, this was sufficient: the older photos dropped off but were still kept on the device they were taken on, the feed was always up-to-date across devices, and the price was certainly right. Now, Apple has announced that it is shutting down the My Photo Stream feature as of July 26, and the service will stop accepting any new photos on June 26th.
Back in 2015, Apple introduced macOS 10.10.3, which brought with it the Photos app we still use today, and iCloud Photo Library. For most My Photo Stream users, this will be the simplest and easiest option for maintaining photo syncing between your devices. The first thing to do before the July 26th deadline is to ensure that the photos in My Photo Stream are saved, and in particular it is best to save your originals on a single device. For storage space reasons, the best device is generally a Mac, backed up by Time Machine or other methods to an attached backup drive or other method to preserve the original photos at the full resolution.
If you’re unsure where the photos in My Photo Stream are saved, open Photos on the Mac, scroll down to the My Photo Stream “album,” select any photos that aren’t already part of your Mac’s Photo Library, and drag them into the general Library. If you’d prefer them to “live” on an iPhone or iPad, open Photos and go into the My Photo Stream album, touch the Select button, tap the photos you want to save, then tap the Share button and choose “Save Image.”
The no-cost tier of iCloud comes with 5GB of space for storing/backing up and syncing things like your Notes, Calendars, Reminders, Safari bookmarks, and other things you choose to sync — but the most important for many users would be their photos and videos. Broadly speaking, 5GB is enough to hold a photo collection of around 1,400 JPEG photos (shot at 10 megapixels) or around 2,500 HEIC 10MP photos, with a bit of room left for iCloud’s other syncing duties. If you’re using an iPhone 12 or later and shooting in ProRAW, though, you’d better make that about 200 to 300 photos.
So for people with a small, tightly-managed JPEG or HEIC based photo library, the free 5GB tier may be sufficient. For most, however, a move to the 99-cent 50GB paid iCloud storage level would be a smart move, just for the value of having an offsite backup of your photos and videos alone. The process is close to effortless. First, open the Photos app on the device where you store your original photos, and see how many images and videos are stored there. If the total is higher than the figures mentioned above, your next step is to upgrade your iCloud storage from the free 5GB tier to the paid 50GB tier — or, if you have a really enormous collection of photos and videos, maybe the 200GB tier.
Alternatively, users may choose to use a third-party service like Microsoft 365, Google Photos, Flickr, 500px, Amazon Photos, SmugMug, or other options. These sites may offer more free photo storage than iCloud Photos, or other benefits. While no third-party service integrates as seamlessly across devices as iCloud, there are apps from most of the third-party photo storage sites that mean you can access everything there on all your devices. Discover the best options for photo storage and sharing! With the proliferation of digital photography, it can be hard to manage your photos and share them with the world. Charles Martin, Contributing Editor for AppleInsider, brings you the best alternatives to iCloud+ for managing your photos. From Flickr and Photobucket to 500px and SmugMug, these services offer features such as portfolio webpages, unlimited storage, 24/7 live human support, and more. With a bit of research and the right service, you can enjoy taking and viewing your captured moments without breaking the bank. Explore your options today!
