The End Of Photo Stream - Digital Darwinism At Work.
Photo by Jon Butterworth on Unsplash.
If you’re an Apple user, chances are that you got an alert recently about My Photo Stream being discontinued on Wednesday, July 26th.
Somehow the announcement recalled my childhood obsession with dinosaurs and their evolutionary trees that played out over eons, dooming some creatures to branch off into obscurity while others kept evolving and adapted into birds.
Software is not that different than dinosaur evolution theory except that the whole Mesozoic Era is about 20 years in digital time and we play the creators.
In this story, My Photo Stream is a prime example of an interesting idea that had promise but couldn’t adapt, and the last remaining installs' days are numbered.
So what’s that mean to you? Truthfully, it's just a great example of how software evolves and improves over time. Not every app or feature is a winner, but the ones that survive the technical jungle - and even the ones that don't - tend to move everything forward.
A main reason that Apple developed Photos was that iPhoto wouldn't fully support iCloud sync services that launched in 2014. Back in the day, everything was a manual process and each image had to be copied between devices. Edits needed to be duplicated everywhere the image lived. It was an organizational nightmare.
My Photo Stream was Apple's trial for wireless syncing from iPhone to other devices, but it was a one-way, one-time push of new photos that minimized the need to regularly hard sync your iPhone to your Mac. An improvement over manual copying, yes, but not the kind of elegant solution that built Apple's reputation.
When you turned on My Photo Stream on the iPhone and Mac, Photo Stream would share your "camera roll" at a reduced size to your Mac via iCloud, up to a maximum of 1000 images. So photo 1001 would delete 0001. When photos showed up in your Mac My Photo Stream, you could either manually import them to your Library or wait until the end of month when iPhoto made a monthly collection of whatever photos were still in Photo Stream. Of course you could always connect a cable and hard sync your photos (still one way) at any time to accomplish the same thing with better results, but it was tedious and often overlooked. People lost photos because they were only on their iPhone. My Photo Stream was a step toward avoiding that. By today's standards, the whole system was pretty lame, but it was ground-breaking at the time.
Most of the time I see PhotoStream enabled today, clients are also using iCloud, which overrides Photo Stream syncing anyway. But when you disable My Photo Stream you get a scary message that any images in My Photo Stream will be deleted on the device. What that means is that this picture “limbo” that has been holding new photos for a month at a time is no longer accessible. But the photos themselves are still on your iPhone and if downloaded on your Mac, still in the Photos Library.
Which is where we’ve been for awhile.
Today, June 26th, My Photo Stream is officially on the way out. Any new photos you take on your iPhone won’t be added to My Photo Stream. For wireless transmission of photos to your Mac you need to be using iCloud Photo Library on both devices or move them manually with AirDrop or via a Lightning cord. Any pictures that are already posted to My Photo Stream will be available to download until July 26th, thirty days from now. Then it all goes away.
Like the dinosaurs.
You may be wondering how you know if you are using My Photo Stream? Well chances are good that you aren't. By default, Apple tries to get you to use iCloud instead, and if iCloud Photo Library is checked in your Photos settings then you are good.
But if you see My Photo Stream showing up in either your iPhone tabs or on your sidebar in Photos for Mac, you should take a look at iCloud or alternatives to ensure your precious photos are backed up. You’ve still got 30 days to sort it out. Reach out to me or your local Apple Store for help.