Through a support page, Apple announced in May that the My Photo Stream application will finally shut down in favor of iCloud Photos. The software will be available until July 26, 2023. After that, users must migrate their photos to iCloud to keep them synced across all devices.
You are not alone if you don’t know what this function is. You might have never used this feature if you have recently created an Apple ID – probably in the past ten years. It’s available for iPhones running iOS 5.1, Macs with OX X Lion 10.7.5, Apple TV 2, or PCs with Windows 7 or later.
My Photo Stream is a free service that can store up to 1,000 photos on the cloud uploaded in the last 30 days. This was useful to have the latest photos synced up on all your devices. For example, if you took a photo on your iPhone, you could easily find it on your Mac.
That said, Apple decided it would no longer support this service, as users should focus on iCloud instead. The company writes, “As part of this transition, new photo uploads to My Photo Stream from your devices will stop one month before, on June 26, 2023. Any photos uploaded to the service before that date will remain in iCloud for 30 days from the date of upload and will be available to any of your devices where My Photo Stream is currently enabled. By July 26, 2023, there will be no photos remaining in iCloud, and the service will be shut down.”
The company explains that the photos in My Photo Stream are already “stored on at least one of your devices,” so as long as you have the device with your originals, you won’t lose any photos as part of this process.
If you’re not an iCloud subscriber, you can set it up on any iPhone with iOS 8.3 or later, iPad with iPadOS 8.3 or later, or Mac with OS X Yosemite or later. After that, you can view your photos and videos in the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, iCloud.com, and even sync them to a Windows PC using iCloud for Windows.
Here’s how to subscribe to iCloud
If you don’t trust storing your 1,000 photos locally and you’re waving goodbye to My Photo Stream, you can always subscribe to iCloud. Here’s what you need to do:
- Go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud.
- Tap Manage Account Storage, tap Change Storage Plan, select an option, then follow the onscreen instructions.
When you subscribe to iCloud+, you can do the following on your iPhone:
- Get 50 GB, 200 GB, or 2 TB of storage.
- Create unique, random email addresses that forward to your personal inbox with Hide My Email.
- Browse the web in an even more secure and private way with iCloud Private Relay.
- Set up home security cameras with HomeKit Secure Video so you can view your footage from anywhere while keeping it private and secure.
- Use a custom email domain to personalize iCloud Mail.
