10 Reasons Why You Should Be Using iCloud Photos

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me tell you why iCloud Photos is one of my favorite parts of the Apple Eco System. 

I love iCloud Photos for many different reasons. If you're not currently using it let me tell you why I think you should. 

First, iCloud Photos makes your photos available to you anywhere that you are. For instance, here I am on my Mac and I'm looking in the Photos App and I see all of my photos. But, what if I'm not sitting down at my Mac or if I have a MacBook I don't have it with me. What if I'm out somewhere and I want to see one of my photos or show a photo to somebody? Well, I've got them all here on my iPhone as well. It automatically syncs. So I can browse through exactly the same photos on my iPhone as I do here on my Mac. I don't have to do anything special for that. There's no syncing process involved. I don't need to connect my iPhone to my Mac and do something to have the photos go across. They are just automatically on my iPhone, on my Mac, on my iPad, on my MacBook. They're everywhere! I can even get to them on the web. That one reason is all I need to love iCloud Photos. 

But there are many other reasons as well. For instance when you take a photo with your iPhone, like this, then it's on your iPhone in the Photos App, of course. But how did it get to your Mac. You don't have to do anything special. You don't even have to connect your phone to your Mac or anything. It just automatically syncs to iCloud and then when you sit down at your Mac the next time the new photo automatically will be added to your library. It just syncs across from iPhone to iCloud to Mac. There it is. 

But what about other cameras. Like if you carry a camera like this and you like to take photos with it, how does this get to iCloud. Well, of course, you could just take the SD card or connect this camera to your Mac and then load it there. But you could do this while traveling as well using a little SD card reader like this or just connecting your camera to your iPhone. You can then get the pictures onto your iPhone and then they will sync over iCloud. So while you're traveling you could be doing that. Your photos can be in iCloud while you're on the go. When you get home they're already sitting there on your Mac. 

Now let's talk about Backups. Ideally you should have your photos well backed up. But a lot of people don't have them backed up at all. They simply take photos with their iPhone and that's it. They are on the iPhone. Someone steals this, they loose it, it breaks or they forget to transfer the photos when they get a new iPhone, they've lost those photos forever. But with iCloud Photos that's not a problem. Those photos are saved to iCloud. So if any bad things happen to your iPhone chances are all of your photos are perfectly safe. It is still not ideal. For instance you can accidentally delete a photo and it will be deleted everywhere. A good backup solution would prevent that. But it's way better than having no backup at all. 

Now how about having a really good backup solution. Well, iCloud Photos enables that as well. You see if you've got a Mac at home, like I do, and you've got the space on the drive, then you should have your Settings in Photos Settings, iCloud set to download originals to this Mac. That means that all of your photos, the original actual photos and edits and all of your tagging and albums and all of that, they are all there on your Mac. So any backup solution you do for your Mac, either using Time Machine to another drive or some sort of online backup service, that is going to get all of your photos backed up. So you can take a photo with your iPhone, it syncs to your Mac at home, and your Mac at home gets backed up, and you actually have a really good comprehensive backup of all your photos and one that just works automatically. 

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Another thing I love about iCloud Photos is easy sharing. Sometimes you want the photos to breakout of your own library and share them with others. So say you're on a trip and you've got a bunch of photos like these and you want to share them. You want to do an online gallery so people can see them. You can simply use the Share Button here. You could choose Share Albums. You can create a New Shared Album. You can invite people to it so it's private or you can also go ahead here and set it up so that it is a public site but one that people need the link to. So instead of having to post picture after picture to a social media platform that maybe not all of your friends use, you can post it to your own little website and add pictures to it as you go. It makes sharing photos while traveling really easy. The other person doesn't even have to have an Apple product at all or an iCloud account to see it if you set it up as a public website. 

Now a common problem people have is they want their photos to be automatically shared with, say, their spouse. This could actually be easily done in iCloud Photos. There's something called iCloud Shared Photo Library. You can read about it right here. It's easy to setup right here in Settings. You just add participants. So say you and your spouse can have a shared library and then every photo you take you can switch modes. You can set it to only be in your personal library or be in your shared library. So, for instance, if my wife and I are traveling together we can both be taking pictures and see each other's pictures in our iCloud Library. There's no messy airdropping things to each other, asking each other for that photo from yesterday. None of that. We just share those photos between our two libraries. It's easy to change which photos are shared and which photos are personal. 

Another really cool aspect of using iCloud Photos is it makes migration very easy. Say you get a new Mac, whether it's because something happened to your old Mac or just time for a new one. The same thing with an iPhone. All you need to do is sign in to iCloud and all your photos are then available on that new device. You don't have to resync or transfer them across or any of that. It's just automatic. I'm still amazed when I hear people say, Oh I had a good photo of that but it was on my old phone. With iCloud Photos that's not even an issue. You go from phone to phone over the years. Mac to Mac over the years and your photos just come along with you. 

Of course another really cool aspect of iCloud Photos is you can go beyond your local storage. So, of course, under Settings in Photos you have two options. Download Originals to this Mac, and Optimize Mac Storage. With Download Originals you need to have enough space to store all your photos on that specific Mac. But with Optimize Mac Storage you don't. Only your most recently viewed photos, they will be local. The rest will be in iCloud but they will download on demand and if you have a fast enough connection you won't even notice that it is downloading your photos as you're viewing them. 

So this is really useful if you have a Mac that simply doesn't have enough internal storage. But it is also useful in my situation where I have a desktop Mac that is set to download originals to this Mac. So it has everything. But with my MacBook I don't need that. I have it set to Optimize Mac storage. So it's not going to take up a huge portion of that drive for photos. Of course iPhones and iPads, they're automatically using the Optimize feature so you can keep taking photos even if your iPhone doesn't really have enough space for them. iCloud will handle it. 

For the last item I want to address the idea of being able to see the actual files for your photos. Like, for instance, here I am in the Finder and I've got a folder with some photos in it and I can see the files. I can kind of feel that I have a lot of control over them. But the files here are just a metaphor. They are just bits scattered around your local storage and they are put together as a file and you have a name here and then it compiles all those bits into a photo. This is just a way of managing the bits that you've collected as files. Using files, folders, and the Finder is a great general purpose method for handling any kind of file, whether it is a spreadsheet, a PDF, or an image. The Photos App is like the Finder but specifically for photos. So its features are there so you can view photos, so you can edit photos, so you can organize your photos and you can easily view the information, like location information, the people in the photos, the objects in the photos, things like that. It's like the Finder but specifically for photos. 

So, it's about having the right kind of app for organizing the right kind of files. You've got your photos in the Photos App using iCloud Photos. You've got all the rest of your files in the Finder for general purpose storage. It's like you've put books on bookshelves but you hang clothes in a closet. That last one is actually more about using the Photos App than iCloud Photos. But they kind of go hand-in-hand. There are actually a lot of other reasons to use the Photos App, like all the editing and organizational tools as well, that don't necessarily mean you need to use iCloud Photos too. 

So those are all the reasons why I love using iCloud Photos and I continue to recommend others use it as well. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.