Apple discontinues My Photo Stream

On July 26th of this year, Apple will be discontinuing something called My PhotoStream. My PhotoStream was a feature that iPhones used before there was iCloud to sync photos and videos from your iPhone to your computer. It’s now basically obsolete so nothing to worry about unless you might be still unknowingly using it to transfer images from your phone. That might be the case if you are not logged into your iCloud account.

So before it shuts down you will need to turn on iCloud on your phone and computer. To check your phone to see if iCloud is turned on, scroll down to Photos in your iPhone settings. Turn on iCloud and I would also checkmark Optimize images as this will save storage space on your phone.

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You might also want to make sure you have enough iCloud storage in your account to accommodate all your images and videos. In the phone settings, click on your name at the top of settings and you will see iCloud listed at the top. If you need more storage hit Manage Account Storage to add more.

Then you will need to open up Apple Photos on your computer and check the settings under the Photos drop down menu. Go to the iCloud tab and turn it on by check marking it. In this case do NOT checkmark Optimize Mac Storage as I always believe you want to have local versions of your full resolution images.

You should now be all set. iCloud will now sync all the images from your iPhone and computer and when it is done (it may take some time if you have a lot of images) you should see the same number of images and videos on each device. And when you now take a photo or video on your phone, it will sync down to your computer in short order.

The Apple eco -system using iCloud works as a pretty good maintenance free system as long as each device is logged into your iCloud account, but If you experience any problems or log in issues, let me know.