Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

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 10-10).

  

  Figure 10-10. Left: Why, look! It’s photos you imported onto your Mac at home. How’d they get here on the iPhone? iCloud! Middle: To rescue one of these photos from the 1,000-photo rule, open it. Then tap the button. Right: Finally, tap Save to Camera Roll (bottom row, center). Now, even after that photo disappears from the Photo Stream, having been displaced by the 1,001st incoming photo, you’ll ...