Next month, Apple will delete an entire picture album from your iPhone. Luckily, there is a simple way to keep the photos from being lost forever.
The tech giant has said that it is ending My Photo Stream, an album that saves your photos from the last 30 days automatically.
As part of the shutdown, My Photo Stream stopped posting photos on June 26, and when the album is deleted on July 26, everything in it will be lost.
If you have an iPhone, you should go to My Photo Stream, which you can get to through the Photos app, and save the photos on your device.
Since 2007, My Photo Stream has been a free option to iCloud Photos, which just got more expensive in the UK and other places.
On its online help page, Apple says, “My Photo Stream will be turned off on July 26, 2023.”
As part of this change, you won’t be able to add new photos to My Photo Stream from your devices after June 26, 2023.
“If a photo you want isn’t already in your library on a certain iPhone, iPad, or Mac, save it to your library on that device.”
Users took to Twitter to talk about how sad it was that the feature that had been around for a decade was going away.
They tweeted, “I used it to transfer photos between my iPhone 6 running iOS 12, my iPhone 4 running iOS 6, and macOS.”
Someone else said, “I think my Apple picture stream just disappeared. I lost many shots.’
Another person said they would give up on Apple and switch to a Google phone.
Steve Jobs made My Photo Stream available in 2011. It is a free service that instantly uploads up to 1,000 photos from the last 30 days.
Users have been able to view photos on multiple Apple devices for more than a decade. This means that if they took a picture on their iPhone, they could find it and download it on their iPad or Mac.
Apple’s new choice shouldn’t worry you too much if you pay for iCloud+ and always have a lot of space for your photos.
But you’re more likely to be affected if you use the free version of iCloud and always run out of space for new pictures.
Go to the Photos app on your iPhone or iPad and then tap Albums at the bottom. This will give you access to My Photo Stream and allow you to save its photos.
My Photo Stream will be one of the albums, along with Recents, WhatsApp, Instagram, and others.
Tap the album called “My Photo Stream,” then tap “Select” in the top right part of the screen.
Next, tap to choose all the pictures you want to keep, then tap Share (a square with an arrow pointing up) and Save Image to save these pictures to your device.
Apple’s help page says that the steps are a little different if you want to save the contents of My Photo Stream to a Mac.
My Photo Stream has always been free, so it’s given users a safe place in the cloud to store their most recent photos for free (though photos taken more than 30 days ago would disappear from My Photo Stream).
My Photo Stream gives you a taste of iCloud, which has a lot more storage space and saves old photos forever.
iCloud gives you 5GB of free storage, which is enough for about 3,500 photos. If you want more storage, you have to pay.
When you hit iCloud’s storage limit, it stops saving your photos. This is where the benefit of My Photos Stream has always come in.
My Photo Stream has always had room for new photos because photos that are 30 days old or older are deleted immediately.
pictures taken on an iPhone or iPad are saved to the camera roll, which is called the Recents folder. This means that the pictures are stored locally on the phone, not in the cloud.
But phones only have a limited amount of storage room, and you can’t get to these files on your other Apple devices unless they are stored in the cloud.
Many of us also delete photos from the Recents folder to make room on our phones, knowing that they will instantly show up in My Photo Stream. This is all changing, though.
It’s not clear why Apple is getting rid of My Photo Stream, but the move could make people sign up for the paid version of iCloud.
Apple users have been getting emails about the shutdown, telling them that iCloud is the best way to keep pictures taken on all of their devices “safely stored.”
MailOnline has asked Apple for their opinion.