Wouldn’t it be great if all the pictures you took on your iPhone could be viewed on your other devices without having to mess around with cables and copying and pasting? Just imagine, you could take a photo on your iPhone and then view and edit the photo on a bigger screen–like an iPad–without having to sync to iTunes or having to constantly email pictures from one device to the next. With Photo Stream, you can do this and so much more!
A few months ago we explained how to create and manage photo albums using only your iPhone. You can find that article by clicking here. Now we are going to move on to how you can use Photo Stream (1) to back up your photos, (2) to view your photos on your other Apple devices, and (3) to share your photos with friends and family.
Photo Stream is an amazing feature that allows you to do several things. First, Photo Stream operates as a way to do a limited backup of your photos. I say “limited” because Photo Stream won’t permanently backup every photo you take forever. Rather, as stated by Apple: “[i]f you have Photo Stream enabled on your iOS device, every single photo you take appears in a special Photo Stream album that holds your last 1000 photos.”1 However, the length of time your photos are stored on iCloud is limited because “iCloud [only] stores new photos for 30 days.”2 Second, Photo Stream makes it easy to share photos between your iPhone, iPad, supported iPod, and Mac computer with iPhoto installed. Finally, Photo Stream makes it easy to share photos or photo stream albums privately with friends and family or publicly with everyone. All of these features make your life easier and cost nothing to use! Now let’s get into the “how-to”.
SimpleiPhone 