Apple is sunsetting Photo Stream
30/05/23 Filed in: photos | iCloud Photo Library
Late last week Apple sent out an email warning people they are planning to shut down their “My Photo Stream” service. Since then I’ve had many people concerned with what this means. It basically comes down to three things.
Short explanation:
Longer explanation:
As Apple’s photo syncing has evolved over the last 10 years or more, they first started with the service called “Photo Stream”. This has been replaced with iCloud Photos. Essentially, it goes like this: You take a picture on your phone or drag a pictures into your library from a computer, then that picture shows up on all your other devices. But there’s a catch. If you don’t pay for iCloud storage space, the old photo stream service would only hold those pictures temporarily giving you time to have drug them out of photo stream and into your library manually. Apple’s strategy was to provide a syncing service to all users but not have to host every photo of every person in the world if that person didn’t want to pay for storage space. So photo stream was basically the free way to sync your pictures between devices but you had to keep up with it yourself. This most recent email from Apple is notifying everyone to make sure that if they’ve not transitioned to newer versions of iOS or MacOS, it’s time to do so before they shut down the old photo stream service.
iCloud Photos has replaced this service but you still need to pay for space in iCloud in order to use this service to its full extent. Now here’s the rub: Many users are buying smaller hard drives instead of larger drives these days. However, as our phone’s camera improves, we’re taking larger and larger resolution pictures. This means we are relying more and more on just letting Apple’s cloud service store our pictures. This results in us needing to increase our cloud storage space. I’m not really a big fan of trusting a cloud service 100% to be the sole backup of my pictures. As I often mention, younger generations are totally fine with just letting the cloud handle it, but us older folks tend to like to have a physical copy of our stuff in addition to using the cloud. Unfortunately, if your hard drive is too small to hold all your pictures then you’d need a separate hard drive dedicated to store them. I have many clients who do just that. See, Apple has a setting on both your phone and your computer to “optimize” your photos library. This translates to “trust us, we’ll keep your pictures on our hard drive in the cloud and you keep paying us money.” Should you one day decide to stop paying Apple for iCloud storage space, you’d have to pay the piper in another way by buying a drive large enough to keep all your pictures anyway. And you’d need to grab all those pictures from Apple’s iCloud before you stopped paying them.
So, I strongly prefer that people have local copies of their pictures as well as using the cloud. This sometimes means buying an external drive to store your pictures in addition to your computer’s internal hard drive. If you’re totally fine only trusting the cloud then just keep using “optimize” but if you’d like a little more peace of mind, you should consider keeping original copies of all your photos both in the cloud and locally. Of course as I stated earlier, this would require local hard drive space as most of us Gen-Xer’s usually have around 150-200 gigs of pictures on average. Keep in mind an important fact. If you are set to optimize photos on your computer, your Time Machine backup is not actually storing the full versions either. Time Machine will only backup what is actually on the local drive. If you are “optimizing” pictures, they’re not really in their full resolutions on your drive for Time Machine to backup. This is another reason I encourage most users to consider buying a 1TB internal drive on all new computer purchases. iPhone is not a storage drive. Your pictures almost never live on your phone in their full resolutions so don’t think “I’m safe. My pictures are on my phone”.
Our photos and personal videos are perhaps our most prized possessions so it’s a really good idea to understand where they are and how to store them responsibly. I may be making this sound like it’s a bigger deal than it is as most of us won’t really need to do anything while Apple transitions from photo stream to iCloud Photos. But there are always people who run into issues during transitions like this and that’s why it’s a great time to re-evaluate your photos strategy and take some time to understand where your pictures are and if you are truly backing them up both to the cloud and locally. If you’d like to find out if you’re storing your pictures locally or just in the cloud, open Photos on your computer, go to Settings, then see if you have “download originals” or “optimize” checked.
The bottom line here is that for most of us, we won’t notice a thing. But there will be some users who haven’t updated to newer versions of MacOS and will be caught off guard. Regardless, now is a very good time to check over how you are storing your pictures and make the best choice for you. Let me know if you need any assistance keeping things straight.
Short explanation:
- Review if you are using iCloud to store your photos
- Update your computer and devices
- Confirm how you backup your photos and be happy with your choice
Longer explanation:
As Apple’s photo syncing has evolved over the last 10 years or more, they first started with the service called “Photo Stream”. This has been replaced with iCloud Photos. Essentially, it goes like this: You take a picture on your phone or drag a pictures into your library from a computer, then that picture shows up on all your other devices. But there’s a catch. If you don’t pay for iCloud storage space, the old photo stream service would only hold those pictures temporarily giving you time to have drug them out of photo stream and into your library manually. Apple’s strategy was to provide a syncing service to all users but not have to host every photo of every person in the world if that person didn’t want to pay for storage space. So photo stream was basically the free way to sync your pictures between devices but you had to keep up with it yourself. This most recent email from Apple is notifying everyone to make sure that if they’ve not transitioned to newer versions of iOS or MacOS, it’s time to do so before they shut down the old photo stream service.
iCloud Photos has replaced this service but you still need to pay for space in iCloud in order to use this service to its full extent. Now here’s the rub: Many users are buying smaller hard drives instead of larger drives these days. However, as our phone’s camera improves, we’re taking larger and larger resolution pictures. This means we are relying more and more on just letting Apple’s cloud service store our pictures. This results in us needing to increase our cloud storage space. I’m not really a big fan of trusting a cloud service 100% to be the sole backup of my pictures. As I often mention, younger generations are totally fine with just letting the cloud handle it, but us older folks tend to like to have a physical copy of our stuff in addition to using the cloud. Unfortunately, if your hard drive is too small to hold all your pictures then you’d need a separate hard drive dedicated to store them. I have many clients who do just that. See, Apple has a setting on both your phone and your computer to “optimize” your photos library. This translates to “trust us, we’ll keep your pictures on our hard drive in the cloud and you keep paying us money.” Should you one day decide to stop paying Apple for iCloud storage space, you’d have to pay the piper in another way by buying a drive large enough to keep all your pictures anyway. And you’d need to grab all those pictures from Apple’s iCloud before you stopped paying them.
So, I strongly prefer that people have local copies of their pictures as well as using the cloud. This sometimes means buying an external drive to store your pictures in addition to your computer’s internal hard drive. If you’re totally fine only trusting the cloud then just keep using “optimize” but if you’d like a little more peace of mind, you should consider keeping original copies of all your photos both in the cloud and locally. Of course as I stated earlier, this would require local hard drive space as most of us Gen-Xer’s usually have around 150-200 gigs of pictures on average. Keep in mind an important fact. If you are set to optimize photos on your computer, your Time Machine backup is not actually storing the full versions either. Time Machine will only backup what is actually on the local drive. If you are “optimizing” pictures, they’re not really in their full resolutions on your drive for Time Machine to backup. This is another reason I encourage most users to consider buying a 1TB internal drive on all new computer purchases. iPhone is not a storage drive. Your pictures almost never live on your phone in their full resolutions so don’t think “I’m safe. My pictures are on my phone”.
Our photos and personal videos are perhaps our most prized possessions so it’s a really good idea to understand where they are and how to store them responsibly. I may be making this sound like it’s a bigger deal than it is as most of us won’t really need to do anything while Apple transitions from photo stream to iCloud Photos. But there are always people who run into issues during transitions like this and that’s why it’s a great time to re-evaluate your photos strategy and take some time to understand where your pictures are and if you are truly backing them up both to the cloud and locally. If you’d like to find out if you’re storing your pictures locally or just in the cloud, open Photos on your computer, go to Settings, then see if you have “download originals” or “optimize” checked.
The bottom line here is that for most of us, we won’t notice a thing. But there will be some users who haven’t updated to newer versions of MacOS and will be caught off guard. Regardless, now is a very good time to check over how you are storing your pictures and make the best choice for you. Let me know if you need any assistance keeping things straight.
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