macOS Sierra: The Missing Manual

Photos

For most people, pictures are extremely important data. iCloud takes the worry out of maintaining your collection by making sure they’re backed up and available online.

In System Preferences→iCloud, click Options to see three on/off checkboxes: iCloud Photo Library, My Photo Stream, and iCloud Photo Sharing. Read on.

iCloud Photo Library

This feature keeps your photos and videos backed up online and synced. All your photos and videos are always backed up, and always accessible from any of your gadgets. That’s all there is to it. Every photo that winds up on your Mac, every picture you take with your iPhone, all wind up on both. You can even see all of this at iCloud.com (click Photos), complete with tabs for Moments, Albums, and the other Photos categories.

There is, of course, a catch. Your entire iCloud account comes with only 5 gigabytes of free storage. If you start backing up your photo library to it, too, you’ll have to pay to expand that storage.

My Photo Stream

Every time a new photo enters your life—when you take a picture with an i-gadget, for example, or import one onto your Mac—it gets added to your Photo Stream. In other words, it appears automatically on all your other iCloud machines.

Unlike iCloud Photo Library, this feature is free. On the other hand, it maintains only the most recent 1,000 photos you’ve taken (Figure 17-9). There’s another limitation, too: The iCloud servers store your photos for only 30 days. But as long as your gadgets go online at least once ...