OS X El Capitan: 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 two on/off checkboxes. My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Sharing are the master switches for Photo Streams and iCloud Photo Sharing.

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. Here’s where to find them:

• iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch. Open your Photos app. There it is: a listing called My Photo Stream. It shows the most recent 1,000 photos you’ve taken with any of your other i-gadgets, or that you’ve imported to your computer from a scanner or digital camera (Figure 15-9).

  Now, Apple realizes that your i-gadget doesn’t have nearly as much storage available as your Mac; you can’t yet buy an iPad with 750 gigabytes of storage. That’s why, on your iPhone/iPad/iPod, your Photo Stream consists of just the last 1,000 photos. (There’s another limitation, too: The iCloud servers store your photos for 30 days. As long as your gadgets go online at least once a month, they’ll remain current with the Photo Stream.)

  Once a photo arrives, you can save it to your Camera Roll, where it’s permanently saved. See Figure 15-9.

  Note

  Photo Stream is the one iCloud feature that doesn’t sync ...