Apple's "My Photo Stream" service is set to shut down on July 26, 2023, which means customers who are still using that feature will need to transition to using iCloud Photos prior to that date.
My Photo Stream is a free service that uploads the last 30 days of images (up to 1,000) to iCloud, making them accessible on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. It predates iCloud Photos and has largely been replaced by the iCloud Photos service at this point.
Going forward, Apple plans to have all customers use iCloud Photos instead of My Photo Stream. New photo uploads to My Photo Stream will stop on June 26, 2023, and images will remain in iCloud as usual for 30 days until the shutdown point.
Because all of the images in My Photo Stream are stored in their original format on at least one Apple device, there isn't a danger of photos being lost as part of the shutdown process. Apple recommends that users who want to have their images on a particular device save them to the Photo Library on that device prior to July 26.
Images in My Photo Stream can be saved to the Photos app on the iPhone by opening up Photos, going to the My Photo Stream album, selecting individual photos, and using the Share button to save them to the Library. The process is the same on the Mac, but you will need to drag images from My Photo Stream to the Library.
Apple suggests that iPhone, iPad, and Mac users turn on iCloud Photos to view their photos and videos across their devices. iCloud Photos is available on iPhones and iPads running iOS 8.3 or later and Macs running OS X Yosemite or later.
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It might have been useless to some people, but I personally liked the fact that when I took a photo on my phone, it showed up on my computer - WITHOUT having to pay for the privilege of having all 18,000 photos in my library stored in the cloud.
I use photo stream all the time. I do not use iCloud Photos and don’t want to, but photo stream made it easy to show someone a picture on my iPad that I had recently taken on my phone without the need to have my entire flipping library synced.
It's obvious that it's a useless feature since it was developed before the entire photo library was moved to the cloud, not because it doesn't count against iCloud storage. Shared photo albums doesn't count against iCloud storage so you're saying Apple is going to axe that too?
In the announcement, Apple says "Moving forward, iCloud Photos ('https://support.apple.com/kb/HT204264') is the best way to keep the photos and videos you take up to date across all your devices and safely stored in iCloud. "
And then when you click on the iCloud Photos link in the support document, it says this-
"If you need more iCloud storage When you sign up for iCloud, you automatically get 5GB of free storage. If you need more space, and access to premium features, you can upgrade to iCloud+."
I mean come on, they want people to buy more storage.
This was a cool feature before iCloud Photo Library came along; I loved seeing all my photos on my Mac automatically without having to transfer them.
However, iCloud Photo Library really does make the feature a bit redundant. The only issue I can see is some very old devices losing access to the latest photos you've taken.
