HOW TO Share your photos and videos >

1 iCloud Photos on Mac

To turn on iCloud Photos on a desktop or notebook Mac, first open the Photos app, and under the Photos menu bar option, open Settings. Under the iCloud tab in the Settings window, check the box labelled ‘iCloud Photos’.

2 iCloud Photos on iPhone

On an iPhone, first open the Settings app. Scroll up until you see the Photos option, then tap it. On the next screen, shown here, tap the switch marked ‘iCloud Photos’ to turn on the iCloud Photos service.

3 iCloud Photos on iPad

It’s a similar story on your iPad. Go to Settings, then tap Photos in the sidebar and turn on iCloud Photos. With this switched on, your photographs and videos are uploaded to iCloud, and synced between devices.

4 Access on iCloud.com

With iCloud Photos turned on, you can access your media online. Open the iCloud website at iCloud.com from any computer with a web browser and internet access, and click the Photos option on the home page.

5 Optimise storage

There’s an option next to the iCloud Photos setting outlined earlier called Optimise [Device] Storage. If you switch this on, only low-res versions of your media will be stored locally, with full resolution versions on iCloud.

6 Sharing photos

To share a picture, open it in Photos and tap the Sharing icon. In the pop-up, tap Copy iCloud Link. You can then paste that link into Mail, Messages or elsewhere, and share it. The recipient gets a thumbnail which can be opened.

7 Edits and delete

When you have iCloud Photos active, edits you make to a photo are synced with other devices using iCloud Photos. If you delete a photo on one device, it’s deleted from all your other iCloud Photos devices too.