iCloud Photos
The ins and outs of the iCloud service you’ll use most
iCloud Photos (formerly iCloud Photo Library) automatically copies any photos or videos you take on your devices and stores them in iCloud. You can then access them on your other Apple devices or share them with others. It supports the most common photo and video formats including Apple’s favoured HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format) and HEVC (High Efficiency Video Codec) formats and the standard JPEG, RAW, PNG, TIFF, MP4 and GIFs used by most image apps. It integrates seamlessly with your Photos app (and the data it syncs includes your People album, which is the one that uses image recognition to recognise people in your photos), and you can also access your library from any web browser via iCloud.com.
One of the things we really like about iCloud Photos is that its edits are nondestructive even when you’re working across devices. If you apply a filter or crop on your iPhone, look at it on your Mac and think ‘nope’, all you need to do is open it on your Mac (or any of your other devices) and click Revert To Original.
When iCloud Photos works, it works like magic: take a photo on your iPhone, for example, and it’s instantly available on all your other devices too. We say ‘when it works’ because sometimes there’s a frustrating delay before new images sync, especially from iPad.
The full picture
Among the many benefits of iCloud Photos is the fact that you don’t have to copy your entire library to every device: on your other devices, it will show the image thumbnails but won’t download them until you tap or click on them. And if you use Optimise Mac Storage on your laptop, you can solve the age-old problem of a too-small hard drive/SSD and a too-big photo library: it intelligently monitors your Photos library and swaps low-res versions as required to prevent your library from getting too big.
The biggest negative is that your Photos library can get very big and, once you go past 5GB, you’ll need to pay for sufficient iCloud storage. You can’t decide to upload some but not all of your photos: