Camera Roll, My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Library.

truenorthstrong

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I'm new to the iOS world, can someone explain what are the differences between Camera Roll, My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Library.

Does camera roll mean these are the photos stored on your phone, my photo stream is the photos that are synced to your Mac's iphoto for example.
iCloud Photo Library, extra storage in a cloud?

One problem I am also having is that my videos don't show up on my Mac in iPhoto, the pictures do automatically when I open iPhoto on my Mac but I don't see the videos unless I connect the iPhone through the cable.
 

Just_Me_D

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In summary: Camera roll consists of the photos stored on your device. Photostream is now iCloud Photo Library. With the previous photostream, you were limited to 1000 photos to sync and the photos would be removed from iCloud after 30 days. With the iCloud Photo Drive, the photos & videos are there for as long as you have available iCloud storage space.
 

cardfan

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There's two separate services here that I think is confusing people.

Photo Stream. This folder was changed to "Recently Added." But anyways, this is where the last 1000 pics or in the last 30 days go. This does NOT count against your icloud storage. But after 30 days, you won't see them on iOS devices anymore unless you saved them. On a PC or Mac, these get downloaded to your respective folders.

Shared Photo Stream. These don't expire. If you want to "save" pics and videos, simply create a shared photo stream. These are NOT counted against your icloud storage. You can also view these from other devices and apple tv.

iCloud Photo Libary. This is pretty confusing right now. Once enabled in settings, you'll most likely have to upgrade your icloud plan as this DOES take up icloud storage in which all your other things that use icloud such as docs, email, backups, etc...use. And here's what it does. It automatically uploads all your pics and videos to icloud. Sounds simple right? But it ALSO downloads "optimized" pics to all your iOS devices. When you delete a pic or video from one device or the icloud libary, it deletes that pic or video from everything. In the future, there will be a photos app for Mac and probably something for PC. But the only current way to access them from PC or Mac is to use icloud.com.

What's the best Apple solution? iCloud photo library requires more expense but low maintenance but still requires space on each iOS device for the "light" version of what's stored on icloud. Shared streaming albums is free and doesn't expire but it's time consuming (if only Apple had a freaking "select all" button in the photos app). My photo stream is very limited but can put the pics on your PC or Mac. None of these are great solutions IMO.
 

cardfan

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In summary: Camera roll consists of the photos stored on your device. Photostream is now iCloud Photo Library. With the previous photostream, you were limited to 1000 photos to sync and the photos would be removed from iCloud after 30 days. With the iCloud Photo Drive, the photos & videos are there for as long as you have available iCloud storage space.

I'm not sure that's correct. Actually you are right but only if icloud photo library is enabled? In fact I'm not sure of anything at this point..lol But my impression is that photostream is a separate thing. My Photo Stream FAQ

Shared photostream albums: iCloud Photo Sharing FAQ

And icloud Photos Library: iCloud Photo Library beta FAQ
 

Ledsteplin

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I get the feeling Apple created this mess just to milk us for more money. I won't use iCloud Photo Library. It will take up my iCloud storage space. I need that for back up. And I don't plan to buy more space. I can use Box,Dropbox and OneDrive for photo storage. I currently have 82 free gb of storage with the 3 apps. I do use iCloud Photo Sharing a bit, but sparingly.


Sent from my ancient but trustworthy iPhone 5.
 

truenorthstrong

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Okay I?m still dumb about it but Thank you all for the clarifications.
Under Photos settings there is iCloud Photo Library (Beta) ? Automatically upload and store your entire library in iCloud to access photos and videos from all of your devices.

My Photo Stream ? Automatically upload new photos and send them to all your iCloud devices when connected to Wi-Fi.

So what would be the point to have both of these clicked on? I guess if you want videos, then you need to have iCloud Photo Library on. If you have this option on, will these photos and videos be in the iPhoto on the Mac?

What about if I have My Photo Stream off and iCloud Photo Library on, will it change anything; is my photo stream pointless then?
 

Ledsteplin

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I'm confused....:crying::crying::crying:

707406fdc013eb80b01ff1bd29844cca.jpg



Sent from my ancient but trustworthy iPhone 5.
 

zerog46

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Your not the only one. I have absolutely no idea about any of the photo sharing streams or anything.

I'm at the point where I'm just going to disable everything and use one drive.
 

Craig

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All I know is iCloud Photo wiped out all my photos on the Phone that were organized in folders. I could not bring them back until I went back to the normal sync with iTunes method. However now there is no way to get the photos you take on your phone to auto-populate anywhere else. I have to use 3rd party apps to move the camera photos over to the PC since iClould is now an all or nothing choice.
 

Nolander07

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I get the feeling Apple created this mess just to milk us for more money. I won't use iCloud Photo Library. It will take up my iCloud storage space. I need that for back up. And I don't plan to buy more space. I can use Box,Dropbox and OneDrive for photo storage. I currently have 82 free gb of storage with the 3 apps. I do use iCloud Photo Sharing a bit, but sparingly.


Sent from my ancient but trustworthy iPhone 5.

Yes, but if you are backing up your photos in iCloud, you no longer have to do that if you are using iCloud photos. It actually takes up less iCloud space if you have more than one device, since they would share the IPL and you don't have to back up both (hope that makes sense).
 

SnapThrow

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All I know is iCloud Photo wiped out all my photos on the Phone that were organized in folders. I could not bring them back until I went back to the normal sync with iTunes method.

This is what I ran into today when I took a look at iCloud Photo Library... for years I have moved my pics out of camera to folders on my Mac and sync'd them back via iTunes. When I clicked on iCloud Photo Library it stated that it cannot also sync photos via iTunes and all my pics would be deleted off the iPhone. What I don't understand is how I get the photos on my Mac to be part of the iCloud syncing feature...
 

Trees

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I also think photo/video management is overly complicated with iOS and Mac. But I'm probably not using the various features correctly or to their full advantage/capabilities.

Sometimes I think that a simple My Documents\Pictures user level file system structure in iOS would help simplify with an equivalent structure in OS X. Or why can't I just select the actual Album in iOS, and then copy that folder intact to OS X\Pictures?
 

bmodi

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I played now a bit with the icloud photo library and here is what i found out.

Regarding the post before that the photo management with IOS and OSX is complicated. At least i do not know any platform or solution which makes it easier. My actual setup: we have 2 iphones, 1 ipad and a Macbook. Up to now i use the, of course, foto stream to synch the photos between our devices. On the Mac i use Aperture to have structurized mediathek. And from the Mac it gets backuped via TimeMachine to a networed attached storage (NAS). Really everything is automized and i do not have to do anything. And to get this running you also nearly need to do nothing......it just works out of the box. In my opinion this is far away from comlicated. I cannot imagine that it could be easier or more comfortable......how??

But back to icloud photo library. I tried it with 1 iphone and activated the photo library. Additional to that i also kept the Photo stream activated on that iphone. The result -> you get the photos to the new icloud photo library and additional to that, if you take new photos, you also get them - via the still activated "old" photo stream - synchronized to all other devices for which the photo library has not been activated.
Also on my Mac i get the new photos via Aperture/old photo stream.

Means, theoretically one could use the new icloud photo library on the IOS devices and on the Mac you still get all photos to Aperture (or IPhoto, makes no difference) to archive and organize them.


However the web platform beta.icloud.com to view the photos in the icloud photo library is nothing to organize the new photos in projects or folders or however you would like to organize your photos. You just get them like on the IOS device in an "All photos" folder and you can view them grouped by "Moments". But thats it. I think to really use the icloud photo library we have to wait for the comming fotos app for OSX. With this i hope everything can be organized like it is possible in Aperture or IPhoto.

Until then i will not use the icloud photo library.

One additional thing. Even if you use the option just to keep an optimized version of a photo on the IOS device (and not the original one) after a while - if you have a huge mediathek - there will be a lot of data on your IOS device. As it looks right now it takes around 10-15% space on the IOS device. However, if you have 10GB of fotos and videos in your icloud photo library you need around 1-1,5GB on your IOS device. Not that much, but my mediathek for example grows every year around 20-30GB (yes, we make tons of photos). I just imagine, after 2 or 3 years i have nearly 100GB in the photo libraray which means around 10-15GB on the IOS device. Everytime you get a new IOS device all this data will be downloaded to it........and whats after 5 or 10 years???

I hope there will be a solution to define, how far back the photos should be synchronized to all devices. At least i do not need 3 year old photos on all my devices.......

Does one know if there is already a solution planned for this??
 

lemieuxfan67

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This is what I ran into today when I took a look at iCloud Photo Library... for years I have moved my pics out of camera to folders on my Mac and sync'd them back via iTunes. When I clicked on iCloud Photo Library it stated that it cannot also sync photos via iTunes and all my pics would be deleted off the iPhone. What I don't understand is how I get the photos on my Mac to be part of the iCloud syncing feature...

Right now you can't, which is one of the reasons why the iCloud Photo Library is in Beta right now. Once the Photos app is released for OSX (early 2015) we will be able to have our iCloud Photo Library synced between iPhone, iPad, Mac, and online at icloud.com. I can understand why this is confusing for some people. Apple would have made the transition much smoother if they would have released iCloud Photo Library for all devices at the same time. Until then, we have a partial product (hence the beta tag).
 

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