How to Turn on My Photo Stream and iCloud Photos
Follow these instructions to activate iCloud Photos or My Photo Stream on your iPad. You can also turn on Shared Albums and invite a group of people to view your individual photos and videos.
Apple Photo Sharing Methods
Apple dumped Photo Stream for iCloud Photo Library, but it kept the My Photo Stream feature in place for users who wanted an alternative to storing photos on iCloud. Here are the three different photo sharing methods:
Select Optimize iPad Storage to replace the photos and videos that are physically stored on your iPad with small device-sized versions. The full-resolution versions are located in the iCloud Photo Library and can be accessed or downloaded any time you have an internet connection.Select Download and Keep Originals if you prefer to keep the full-size photos currently stored on your iPad on the device (in addition to in the iCloud Photo Library). This options makes your iPad photos accessible on your iPad even without an internet connection, although it affects the amount of storage that is available on the device.
iCloud Photo Library. The main difference between iCloud Photo Library and My Photo Stream is where the photos are stored. In My Photo Stream, images are stored on your device and pushed to your other devices, where they are also stored locally. With iCloud Photo Library, photos are uploaded to the cloud and stored there where all the devices can access them at will. This ends up saving a lot of space on individual devices, but there is a drawback: If your device isn’t connected to the internet, you can’t view the photos.My Photo Stream. This service remained the same during the transition to iCloud Photo Library. When it is turned on, My Photo Stream pushes a copy of all new photos and videos made during the previous 30 days to every device that uses the same Apple ID and has My Photo Stream activated. These images are not automatically saved to iCloud.Shared Albums. This is the same feature as Shared Photo Streams with a new name. Shared Albums allows you to invite a group of friends and family to a shared stream. After the group is created, you can share individual photos and videos with everyone in the group.
