I have two pieces of news for you this morning. The first is that My Photo Stream, the free cloud-based photo syncing feature Apple launched in 2011, is still up and running in 2023. That’s despite it being effectively superseded by iCloud Photo Library roughly eight years ago. Now that you’re up to date, the second piece of news is that My Photo Stream is shutting down in a couple of months’ time on July 26th, according to an Apple Support page spotted by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
The end of My Photo Stream won’t come as too much of a surprise. Although it was free, it came with a long list of restrictions on the amount of photos you could upload, and these were only saved on Apple’s servers for 30 days. Photos saved in the cloud then had to be manually saved locally if you wanted to keep them on a secondary device and, perhaps worst of all, 9to5Mac notes that high-quality photos weren’t synced in their original resolution.
iCloud’s free storage may be relatively limited at just 5GB, but at least it acts like a modern cloud storage service with photos and videos stored in their full resolution.
Apple’s support page notes that new photo uploads to My Photo Stream will come to an end on June 26th, and that the feature will disappear entirely a month later. “The photos in My Photo Stream are already stored on at least one of your devices,” Apple’s page notes, “So as long as you have the device with your originals, you won’t lose any photos as part of this process.”
