iCloud Photos
Store and share more photos than your iPhone can handle
For many Apple users, iCloud Photos is the iCloud feature they’ll use the most. No matter how much storage you have in your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, using your device’s cameras to take photos or shoot video in high quality will quickly use up your local storage. For example our iPhone has 128GB of total storage, but our Photos library is 251GB. With iCloud Photos we can store the majority of our photos and videos on Apple’s servers, downloading only the photos we want to look at when we want to look at them. We can still browse through the thumbnails, but the full resolution images are only downloaded on demand.
To enable that option on your own iCloud account, simply open Photos on your Mac and go into Preferences > iCloud, and choose Optimise Mac Storage.
The other big advantage of iCloud Photos is that it makes it easy to access your photos from anywhere; not just your iPhone or your Mac, but also your Apple TV and any web browser that can access iCloud.com.
And because everything is kept in sync, your library is always up to date – whether it’s a screenshot on your Apple Watch, a photo from your iPhone or an image you’ve saved from Safari on your iPad, whatever it is, it’s instantly available to all your devices and to iCloud.com too.
One of our favourite things about iCloud is that the editing is non-destructive: when you change an image, iCloud stores not just the changed image but the original. For example, if you edit an image on your iPhone and then decide it looks odd when you view it on your iPad, you can undo the changes on your iPad and the library will return the original image.
It’s not all good, though. Sometimes our iPad, and it’s only ever our iPad, takes forever to upload new photos to our iCloud Photo Library even when it’s charging; and you can’t choose to store just a selection of photos in iCloud: it’s all of them or none of them, and if you end up using more space you’ll need to buy more iCloud storage. But overall we think iCloud Photos is a brilliant service and one of the very best things about iCloud.