Apple is removing the My Photo Stream service from its roster of iCloud offerings.
After nearly twelve years, Apple is shuttering one of its most innovative cloud-based photo services, with all uploaded photos set for deletion by July 26, 2023.
Launched alongside iOS 5 in October 2011, My Photo Stream was presented as part of Apple’s new iCloud service, providing an easy way to automatically share a user’s 1,000 most recent photos between all of their devices and keeping them stored in the cloud for up to 30 days.
Following a recent announcement from Apple, uploads to My Photo Stream will stop on June 26, meaning that no photos will remain beyond July 26, thirty days later.
Furthermore, users who have only recently created their Apple ID may already find that My Photo Stream is no longer available. This is all part of Apple’s push to move people away from My Photo Stream and over to iCloud Photos.
Will I lose my photos?
My Photo Stream automatically deletes uploaded photos after 30 days, but you can make sure no pictures will be permanently lost by saving them to your device’s local storage before they eventually disappear from the service. To preserve the best quality versions of your photos, download them to a Mac or PC, rather than an iOS device to receive the highest-quality pictures.
My Photo Stream has become somewhat outdated, with the vast majority of features better supported by iCloud Photos. However, there are a few cases where users could lose out.
People who don’t have adequate available storage space in iCloud will no longer be able to use My Photo Stream to sync photos between devices. This is because photo uploads to iCloud Photos count against your iCloud storage quota whereas uploads to My Photo Stream do not. If you run out of iCloud storage, you won’t be able to upload your photos to share them.
Apple's My Photo Stream service used iCloud to sync your recent photos between all of your devices.
My Photo Stream users with very old (and, by now, unsupported) devices also may not be able to run iCloud Photos. My Photo Stream requires a device supporting at least one of the following operating systems: iOS 5.1, OS X Lion 10.7.5, tvOS 5.0 or Windows 7. On the other hand, iCloud Photos requires iOS 8.3, OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 or Windows 10.
If you’re still using an unsupported device, you’ll either have to upgrade or find a new way to sync your photos.
Differences
My Photo Stream was designed to help you sync or transfer photos between all of your iCloud-enabled devices. It’s not a photo library as such as it provides only temporary storage, maintaining only the last 30 days of uploads. It’s also limited to a total of only 1,000 photos at any one time.
More importantly, it doesn’t support video, live photos, GIFs or modern formats such as HEIF, and downloads to iOS devices are limited to low-resolution copies of the original photos. Furthermore, any edits you might make to your photos are not updated on other devices.
While iCloud Photos requires a paid subscription to use beyond the initial free allocation of 5GB, its range of supported features far outclasses My Photo Stream and it is a much more powerful service.
You can read a comprehensive list of differences between the two services in this Apple support document.
Don’t panic
The loss of My Photo Stream is likely to affect relatively few people and, more importantly, no photos will be suddenly deleted that wouldn’t have been removed anyway after the usual 30-day retention limit.
However, if you’re still using My Photo Stream, the time has come to move on.
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