Manage Your Photos
As we’ve seen, iCloud’s main modus operandi is “just put all my data everywhere,” and you’ll undoubtedly want to include your photos and videos among that data. iCloud includes three different features for handling photos and videos.
The first two—iCloud Photos and My Photo Stream—are for syncing photos. iCloud Photos keeps your entire photo library in sync automatically across your devices via the cloud, but counts synced photos (and videos) against your iCloud data storage quota. My Photo Stream, on the other hand, doesn’t affect your storage quota, but makes only your most recent photos available on all your iCloud-compatible devices. (The two sync methods have other differences, too, as I explain ahead.)
The third feature, Shared Albums (previously called iCloud Photo Sharing), lets you share photo streams with other people—although shared photo streams follow different rules than My Photo Stream.
These three features can be confusing individually and in how they overlap. In this chapter I untangle them for you, explaining which features offer which options, and which of the three you should use in particular situations.
Compare iCloud Photo Options
iCloud Photos and the older My Photo Stream both sync photos across your devices via the cloud, but they differ in almost every other detail. You can use either or both, though most people will probably find that iCloud Photos alone is all that’s needed, as it essentially makes My Photo Stream superfluous—at least for those who have paid for enough iCloud storage to hold all their photos and videos.
iCloud Photos
I say more about iCloud Photos ahead in Use iCloud Photos, but for now, here are its main characteristics:
Gives you a single library across your Macs, PCs, and iOS/iPadOS devices, and the iCloud website (using the Photos app on each platform), as well as on the Apple TV HD (or later)
Supports both photos and videos
Counts against your iCloud storage quota
Can store as many photos as you like, for as long as you keep paying
Works over Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and cellular connections
Replaces Camera Roll (and the My Photo Stream album) in iOS and iPadOS
Disables copying photos directly from a Mac or PC via the Finder or iTunes
Uploads original, full-resolution photos but can instead optionally store smaller, optimized copies on each device to reduce space consumed
My Photo Stream
My Photo Stream has been around since the beginning of iCloud, although it has changed a bit over the years. You can learn all about it in Use My Photo Stream. For now, notice how, in contrast to the iCloud Photos features listed above, My Photo Stream gives you more in some ways, but less in others:
Supports still photos only—no videos or Live Photos
Doesn’t count against your iCloud storage quota
Stores only your 1,000 most recent photos (across all devices) on each device
Stores photos online for 30 days
Allows full-resolution permanent downloads to Macs
Uploads original, full-resolution photos, but downloads smaller versions on iOS/iPadOS devices
No longer available for Windows
Use iCloud Photos
With iCloud Photos (formerly called iCloud Photo Library), your photo library is stored in the cloud and visible in your account on the iCloud website and accessible from an Apple TV HD or later. The Photos app on any Mac or iOS/iPadOS device you own stores a version of all those photos: either full-resolution originals, if you have the space, or optionally optimized thumbnails to reduce space occupied or to fit the whole library. (Full-resolution media is always retained and accessible in your cloud storage.) Your Windows PC can also store full copies of everything, available in the built-in Photos app for Windows.
The only catch with iCloud Photos is that you will certainly have to pay Apple for iCloud storage beyond the included 5 GB, and may even have to pony up for the higher tiers of storage, 200 GB or 2 TB.
Enable iCloud Photos on a Mac
To enable iCloud Photos on a Mac, choose either of the following:
In Catalina or later, go to System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud and select Photos; in Mojave, go to System Preferences > iCloud, click the Options button next to Photos, select iCloud Photos, and click Done.
Open Photos, go to Photos > Preferences > iCloud, and select iCloud Photos.
Whichever way you enabled it, open Photos > Preferences > iCloud (if you aren’t there already). From there, you can pick how you to manage local storage of photos and videos. Choose between:
Download Originals to This Mac: If you have enough storage and want full-resolution local copies of all your images and videos, this option always retains and downloads all media across your devices.
Optimize Mac Storage: When you lack enough storage to hold your entire Photos library or prefer to not retain everything locally, this option automatically manages when full-resolution versions are downloaded or retained. In most cases, only a low-resolution preview of your photos or videos is kept locally. When you add items to Photos on other devices, only the thumbnail is retrieved to this device. Images added locally are uploaded to the cloud and the full-resolution version deleted as storage space on the drive is required. However, Photos always downloads the full-resolution version when you view, edit, or share a photo or video if only the thumbnail is currently stored locally.
Even if you choose optimize on all your devices (Mac, iOS, and iPadOS), the full-resolution version of all your photos and videos is always stored in the cloud.
See Learn More about iCloud Photos for what to do next; or keep reading to learn how to set up iCloud Photos on other platforms.
Enable iCloud Photos on an iOS or iPadOS Device
To enable iCloud Photos on an iOS or iPadOS device, follow these steps:
Tap Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Photos and make sure iCloud Photos is on (Figure 9).
Figure 9: Turn on iCloud photo syncing options here. If you want to keep your originals on the device (space permitting), leave Download and Keep Originals selected.
Alternatively, tap Optimize Device Storage to keep smaller versions of the photos on your device to save space—Photos automatically serves up the full-resolution version when editing or sharing.
See Learn More about iCloud Photos for what to do next; or keep reading to learn how to set up iCloud Photos under Windows.
Enable iCloud Photos on a PC
To enable iCloud Photos on a Windows PC (if you didn’t already do so when you Set Up iCloud for Windows), do the following:
Locate the iCloud app in the Start menu and open it. Sign in if you have not already done so.
Make sure Photos is checked.
Click the Options button next to Photos.
Select iCloud Photos to turn on automatic uploads and downloads of full-resolution photos and videos. Click Done.
Learn More about iCloud Photos
Once you’ve set up iCloud Photos on each device, photo libraries across your devices will begin syncing with the cloud to create a superset of all images and videos across your devices. You don’t have to do anything special after taking photos on an iOS or iPadOS device—they sync to iCloud automatically, and from there, to your other devices.
Remember that with iCloud Photos enabled, Camera Roll disappears, as does the My Photo Stream album, if you also use My Photo Stream; you’ll now go to All Photos to see what used to be in those two albums. You can also view, upload, download, and arrange photos from your iCloud Photos in The Photos Web App.
Theoretically, that should be all there is to it: things just work, all your photos automagically appear everywhere, and you no longer have to think about syncing or wonder where your photos are. But, of course, it’s not quite that simple.
You may have any number of questions. How does iCloud Photos handle duplicates? What happens when I delete a photo? Can I merge libraries from two different Macs? What if I want to keep using iPhoto or Aperture? And so on.
Apple took a first stab at answering some of these questions on its Set up and use iCloud Photos page, and it’s worth a quick read. However, I found that document to be lacking in detail and missing all the truly hard or interesting questions. So I took the liberty of supplementing it in my extensive TidBITS article iCloud Photo Library: The Missing FAQ (which is a bit old but still largely accurate). Between those two documents, you should find most of the information you need to understand the intricacies of iCloud Photos and solve common problems.
Meanwhile, since the Photos app is the preferred way to sync your photo library across your devices (and, in iOS/iPadOS, the only way)—and it’s quite a bit different from the old iPhoto and Aperture apps it replaces—you may be looking for more extensive help with using Photos. For that, I recommend reading Jason Snell’s book Take Control of Photos.
Use My Photo Stream
Like iCloud Photos, My Photo Stream syncs your own photos across devices. It doesn’t count toward your storage quota and it works with Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture on your Mac. But although this feature is not quite as inscrutable as it once was, it still involves a number of less-than-obvious limitations and gotchas.
Understand How My Photo Stream Works
With My Photo Stream, your Mac or iOS/iPadOS device can automatically send newly taken or imported photos up to the cloud, from where they then percolate to the rest of your devices. The photos stored in the cloud and available for instant access by all your devices are said to be “in My Photo Stream,” which seems like a mixed metaphor (are they up in the cloud or flowing down a stream?), but in any case, the image of a fleeting, temporary existence is apt, as I explain shortly.
Syncing Photos with My Photo Stream
With My Photo Stream, you need not transfer photos manually from one device to another. The process looks like this:
Digital camera to computer: You continue to connect your digital camera to your Mac as before, and your computer remains the central repository for all your photos. But…
Computer to cloud: Your Mac automatically uploads all new photos to the cloud.
iOS/iPadOS device to cloud: As soon as you take a picture, your device uploads it to Apple’s servers. This only occurs over Wi-Fi. (If aren’t connected to a Wi-Fi network, My Photo Stream queues the uploads until you are.)
Cloud to iOS/iPadOS device: Photos that appear in your iCloud account from another source (that is, a different iOS or iPadOS device, or your digital camera by way of your Mac) are pushed down to all your iOS and iPadOS devices right away—again, assuming a Wi-Fi connection is available.
Cloud to computer: Similarly, photos taken on an iOS or iPadOS device and pushed up automatically to the cloud are, in turn, pushed back down to your Mac.
You never need to click so much as a single button to sync photos among iOS or iPadOS devices and computers. Only conventional digital cameras still require those manual steps.
My Photo Stream Limitations
To this point, I’ve pretended that with My Photo Stream all your photos are magically transported to all your devices, but that’s only sort of true. Since the initial release of iCloud, Apple has relaxed many of the earlier limitations for online photo storage—see Apple’s article My Photo Stream and Shared Albums limits for details—but five key qualifications remain:
iCloud stores My Photo Stream photos for only 30 days. After 30 days, iCloud’s servers dump older photos from My Photo Stream. Therefore, in order to make sure all your photos propagate to all your devices, you should make sure your devices are turned on and connected to the internet at least once every 30 days. (Keep reading for further details.)
Because of this limitation, if you’re still using iPhoto or Aperture, and iCloud Photos is not enabled, open that older app at least once every 30 days to be sure that all the photos in My Photo Stream are automatically imported to your permanent library on your Mac—even though photos download to your Mac automatically, the import happens only when the app is open. (This additional step is not needed in Photos, which downloads the images in the background and automatically.)
iOS and iPadOS devices store only 1,000 photos in My Photo Stream. No matter how many photos My Photo Stream uploads to the cloud, the local My Photo Stream album on any iOS or iPadOS device maxes out at 1,000 photos. When an iOS or iPadOS device takes or downloads photo number 1,001, the oldest one disappears from the local My Photo Stream album on the device.
The exception? There’s no limit to how many photos you can import—automatically or manually—from My Photo Stream to your Mac to your permanent Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture library, and no limit to how many can be in My Photo Stream on a Mac.
My Photo Stream can’t contain videos or Live Photos. My Photo Stream is for still photos only—you’ll have to sync videos manually. (However, this limitation doesn’t apply to shared photo streams, which we’ll get to shortly.) Use iCloud Photos if you need to sync videos or Live Photos.
My Photo Stream is Wi-Fi-only on iOS and iPadOS devices. For iOS and iPadOS devices, My Photo Stream works only when the device is connected to a Wi-Fi network, not when it’s using a cellular data connection. That’s true regardless of your carrier or data plan. (iCloud Photos doesn’t share this limitation.)
Uploads aren’t retroactive. My Photo Stream doesn’t upload retroactively: each device uploads all photos that you take or import after enabling it on the device, but it doesn’t upload photos from before you enabled it. (iCloud Photos, on the other hand, uploads everything in your library.)
No Windows support. As I mentioned before, My Photo Stream was formerly available for Windows, but no more.
In addition, the My Photo Stream album doesn’t appear on any device with iCloud Photos enabled. That doesn’t mean your photos aren’t being transferred; it’s just that they’re not segregated—they appear in All Photos. Because iCloud Photos effectively does everything My Photo Stream does and more, there’s no real way to tell which mechanism was used to transfer any particular photo.
Use My Photo Stream with an iOS or iPadOS Device
To activate My Photo Stream on an iOS or iPadOS device, tap either Settings > Photos or Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Photos and make sure Upload to My Photo Stream (or simply My Photo Stream, if iCloud Photos is disabled) is turned on. That’s it—no further configuration is required or possible. Having done that:
From now on, photos you take on your iOS or iPadOS device are uploaded to My Photo Stream automatically. Any photos you add to All Photos or your Camera Roll in another way, such as by taking screenshots, are uploaded too.
My Photo Stream doesn’t delete images from the iOS or iPadOS device on which they’re taken when a photo expires from My Photo Stream! Whatever’s in All Photos or your Camera Roll is saved until you delete it manually.
Your iOS or iPadOS device will automatically download photos added to My Photo Stream by your Mac or another iOS or iPadOS device you own. To view them:
If iCloud Photos is not enabled: You can see your photos in the My Photo Stream album in the Photos app. The My Photo Stream album holds up to 1,000 photos that most recently appeared in My Photo Stream regardless of which device took them.
To save a photo arriving in the My Photo Stream album from another device to an enduring location on your iOS or iPadOS device, go to the My Photo Stream album, tap Select, select one or more photos, and then tap Add To followed by the name of an existing album or New Album. You can add photos to any album you created on your iOS or iPadOS device, but not to albums you created on your computer and copied to your iOS or iPadOS device.
If iCloud Photos is enabled: The My Photo Stream album doesn’t appear, because All Photos (which replaces Camera Roll when iCloud Photos is enabled) already contains all your photos. As a result, My Photo Stream uploads your photos but doesn’t need to download them.
To delete photos from My Photo Stream:
If iCloud Photos is not enabled: Open the Photos app, tap Albums > My Photo Stream, tap Select, tap one or more photos, and then tap the Trash
icon. Tap Delete Photo to confirm. This removes the photo from iCloud and from the My Photo Stream album on all your devices. However, if Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture was configured to import photos from My Photo Stream automatically, the photo will still appear there in your library. In addition, if the photo was already synced from the Finder or from iTunes running on a Mac or PC, it may still appear elsewhere in the Photos app.If iCloud Photos is enabled: You can’t delete photos from My Photo Stream with an iOS or iPadOS device. You’ll need to use a Mac, PC, or Apple TV to do it. (Deleting photos from All Photos removes them from iCloud Photos—meaning it deletes them from the cloud and all your devices—but not from My Photo Stream.)
If you turn off My Photo Stream on your iOS or iPadOS device (or sign out of your iCloud account completely), all the photos in the My Photo Stream album on the device are deleted if iCloud Photos is disabled, but they remain in the cloud for up to 30 days, and on all your other devices. (With iCloud Photos enabled, the photos aren’t deleted at all.)
Use My Photo Stream on a Mac
If you’re using iCloud Photos, the iCloud servers contain the master copies of all your photos. But if you’re using only My Photo Stream, your Mac serves as the master library for all your photos. You can continue to import photos from a digital camera as you have in the past, but any photos you take on an iOS or iPadOS device will find their way to your computer and then stay there indefinitely, even after they’ve disappeared from the cloud-based My Photo Stream.
If you prefer not to store photos on any given computer, you can turn off My Photo Stream altogether on that computer; and if you use Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture on a Mac, you can adjust iCloud’s photo behavior in a couple of ways.
You can access My Photo Stream with Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture. Set it up as follows:
In Photos, choose Photos > Preferences. (Or, in iPhoto, choose iPhoto > Preferences; or in Aperture, choose Aperture > Preferences.) Then click iCloud (Figure 10).
Figure 10: Configure My Photo Stream options here. (This figure shows Photos; iPhoto and Aperture offer similar options.) In Photos, if iCloud Photos is checked, uncheck it, because turning on iCloud Photos automatically disables My Photo Stream.
Check or uncheck the following items as you see fit:
- My Photo Stream: With this selected, all newly added photos in My Photo Stream download automatically to your Mac. Enabling My Photo Stream adds a My Photo Stream item to the sidebar of Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture (except when iCloud Photos is also enabled). When you select that in iPhoto or Aperture, My Photo Stream appears as an album, as do any shared photo streams; double-click an album to view its contents.
Automatic Import: When checked, as other devices’ uploaded photos appear in My Photo Stream, they’re imported into your permanent iPhoto or Aperture library too. If you leave this unchecked, you can still see the photos by selecting iCloud in the sidebar and then double-clicking My Photo Stream; and you can manually import photos as long as they’re still in the local My Photo Stream album by dragging them from there to Events or Photos.
Note that iPhoto or Aperture must be open for them to import photos, so it’s a good idea to open them occasionally if only to let them catch up with My Photo Stream imports. This is unnecessary with Photos, which can import items from My Photo Stream even when it’s not running.
Automatic Upload: When checked, all new photos that you import into iPhoto or Aperture (for example, from your digital camera) are uploaded to My Photo Stream. If you prefer to keep newly added photos on your Mac only, or if you want to choose which photos go in My Photo Stream, uncheck this. Unchecking that option means that only photos from other device(s) where My Photo Stream is active will be uploaded automatically to My Photo Stream.
Having completed that setup, no further manual steps are required: photos travel to and from the cloud as needed whenever you’re connected to the internet.
You can also add photos manually to My Photo Stream. For example, if you disabled Automatic Upload, or if you wanted to push photos to the cloud that were in your library before you enabled My Photo Stream. To do so, select one or more photos in your library. Then, either drag them to the My Photo Stream item in the sidebar of Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture, or (if the app supports it) choose Share > iCloud and select My Photo Stream. (This only works for photos, not videos, as with all My Photo Stream features.)
To delete photos from My Photo Stream in Photos, select them and press Delete. In iPhoto or Aperture, select iCloud in the sidebar and double-click My Photo Stream. Select one or more photos, choose Photos > Delete from My Photo Stream (or press Delete), and then click Delete Photos to confirm.
In either case, this procedure removes the photos from the My Photo Stream album in Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture as well as from iCloud, which means they also disappear from the My Photo Stream album on your other devices. However, any photos you’d imported (manually or automatically) into Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture, or synced to an iOS or iPadOS device via iTunes, will remain there. (Because iCloud Photos isn’t enabled, deleted images aren’t removed from the original devices that captured or imported them.)
Share Photos, Videos, and Albums
With Shared Albums (referred to as iCloud Photo Sharing in Windows), you can set up one or more shared photo albums that contain a subset of your photos. These are also called shared streams, though that name appears mainly in iPhoto and Aperture.
You can then invite others to subscribe to those photo albums, which will be available on any of their devices, or optionally on the web. Likewise, you can subscribe to photo albums other people have shared with you. And, you can also share individual photos or videos.
A shared photo album can hold a maximum of 5,000 photos or (unlike My Photo Stream) videos up to 5 minutes long (again, see Apple’s article My Photo Stream and Shared Albums limits for details). And, shared photo albums are not subject to the 30-day limit of My Photo Stream; once you share photos, they remain available until you delete the photos or the shared photo album.
People who subscribe to a photo album you’ve shared can comment on (or simply “like”) the photos, and can add their own photos and videos if you permit. For details about dealing with comments, likes, subscribers, and other aspects of shared photo albums beyond what I cover here, see Apple’s article If Shared Albums aren’t working.
Share Photos from an iOS or iPadOS Device
To share photos or videos individually:
Open the Photos or Camera app and then navigate to the photos or videos you want to use.
Tap Select, select the item(s) that you want to share, and tap the Share
icon.Tap Copy iCloud Link, and then paste the resulting URL into Messages, Mail, or anywhere else you’d like. (This link expires after 30 days.)
To add items to a shared album, follow these steps:
Open the Photos or Camera app and then navigate to the photos or videos you want to use.
Tap Select, select the item(s) that you want to share, and tap the Share
icon.Tap Add to Shared Album. What happens next depends on your circumstances:
If you haven’t created any shared albums on this device yet, you’ll be prompted to enter the name for a new album; do so and tap Next.
If you’ve already set up shared photo albums, iCloud defaults to the most recently used album; to add items to this album, enter an optional comment and tap Post. To add items to a different existing album, tap Shared Album and select an album from the list. Or, to create a new album, tap Shared Album > New Shared Album, enter a name for the new album, and tap Next.
For a newly created shared album, enter the name or email address for each contact with whom you want to share and tap Next. Note that only iCloud members can join shared photo albums; if you want recipients who are not iCloud members to be able to view the photos on the web, you must enable the Public Website feature (described just ahead).
Enter an optional comment (200 characters or less), and tap Post.
Photos and videos in shared albums then appear on all your devices that have Shared Albums enabled. iCloud notifies recipients by email of the newly available shared photo album. Once a recipient joins a shared album, that album appears on all devices that are signed in with that user’s iCloud Apple ID.
To modify a shared album, open the Photos app and tap Shared to view your list of shared photo albums. Then:
To add more photos, tap the shared album’s name, tap the plus
icon, select one or more photos, tap Done, and then optionally enter a comment and tap Post.To change an album’s settings, tap the shared album’s name and then tap People. You’ll then see the following options:
Invite People: Tap to invite more people (up to 100 per album).
Subscribers Can Post: Leave this on (the default) to let subscribers add their own photos and videos to the album; turn it off to make it read-only.
Public Website: If this is on (it’s off by default), iCloud creates a webpage of the shared photo album that anyone can view—even people without any iCloud-compatible devices. Tap Share Link to send the link to others; the URL also appears on the screen.
Notifications: Leave this on (the default) to be notified when subscribers interact with the shared album—for example, commenting or adding photos.
To delete a shared album, tap Edit, tap the stream’s Delete
icon, and then tap Delete.
Share Photos from a Mac or PC
Sharing photos from a Mac or PC is similar to how you share on an iOS or iPadOS device.
Share Photos from a Mac
To share photos or videos individually or to send items to a shared photo album, first select one or more photos or videos in your photo library. Then:
Photos: Click the Share
icon. Then…To share individual items, click Mail, Messages, or another app name; macOS sends the selected app a link to the shared item(s), which expires after 30 days. Then skip the rest of these steps.
To share an entire album, choose Shared Albums from the pop-up menu, enter an optional comment, and click an existing shared album or New Shared Album. If you’ve clicked New Shared Album, enter an album name, one or more addressees, and an optional comment, and click Create.
iPhoto or Aperture: Choose Share > iCloud and click an icon—My Photo Stream, an existing shared photo album, or New Photo Stream. You may then need to take additional steps:
If you clicked an existing shared photo album, type an optional comment, and click Publish.
If you clicked New Photo Stream, enter the name(s) or address(es) of the contact(s) with whom you want to share it, enter a name for the photo album and an optional comment, select or deselect the photo album options (discussed in the previous section), and then click Share.
To adjust the settings for a shared photo album, or to learn the web URL for a shared photo album’s public website:
Photos: Select the shared album in the sidebar and click the People
icon on the toolbar.iPhoto or Aperture: Select iCloud in the sidebar, click the icon for the shared photo album, and then choose View > Info. The controls appear at the right.
When viewing a shared photo album, you can drag photos from it to your permanent Photos, iPhoto, or Aperture library to import them, just as with any other photo.
To delete a shared photo album:
Photos: Right-click (or Control-click) the shared album name in the sidebar and choose Delete Shared Album from the contextual menu.
iPhoto or Aperture: Select the shared album’s icon in the main pane of the iPhoto or Aperture window, and then choose Photos > Delete Photo Stream.