Accessing Your iCloud Data in a Web Browser

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at accessing iCloud using a web browser. 

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So iCloud is a variety of Cloud Services that Apple provides to Mac, iPad, and iPhone users. It allows you to share your files and data across all of your Apple devices. You can see it in the Finder of Filed Apps. You can see it in Photos. Use it in apps like Mail and Productivity Apps like Notes, Reminders, Calendar, and Contacts. You can collaborate on documents in Apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. But in addition to being able to use iCloud in those particular apps on Apple devices, you can also access a lot of your data in a web browser. It can be the web browser on your Mac or it could be the web browser on another computer. Like a Windows computer or an android phone. 

So to do this all you need to do is go to iCloud.com. This is the iCloud website. Here you'll find a sign-in button. So you would sign-in using your Apple account. If you are on a Mac and you're already signed into an Apple account then you can just use your local password or touch ID to get in. Once you're in you get to your Dashboard for all of your iCloud Services. Now this is new as of November 2022. It has a whole new look to the main dashboard here. Instead of just seeing icons for different apps that you can access you're going to see these boxes here that not only allow you to access those apps but will show you some content in those apps. Like for instance photos in the Photos App. Some files in the Drive App. You top notes here. Mail in your inbox right here. You can click on one of these to jump into the app or sometimes you can click on the piece of content directly to go into the app and also view that piece of content. 

Now by apps what I really mean are web-based versions of those apps. You're not actually going to launch Mail on your Mac. After all you can't do that if say you're on a Windows computer browsing this in Microsoft Edge. So what happens if you click on Mail here is it actually launches the web version of the Mail app. You can see I'm still in Safari here. This is a version of the Mail app that actually runs in a web browser. You can view your Mail messages right here and it looks kind of like the Mail app on your Mac. You can reply to messages, forward messages. You can Delete them, Archive them, Move them to a folder. You can even Control Click on them here and get a whole variety of the different actions you can perform on the message.

Now in the case of the Mail App this works for your iCloud.com email account. It won't pick up mail from other accounts like Goggle or Yahoo. You would go to those websites to view those. 

So to get back to the Dashboard just click on iCloud at the top left corner. You can go into another app. Like for instance in the Photos App here I can click on a particular photo instead of just at the top and it will take me to the Photos App and take me to that exact photo. Now if I go back up a level I could view my entire Photos Library here. Favorites, different albums, Media types, and all of that. You don't have all the Editing tools that you have on Photos on the Mac but you can select a photo. You can download it. You can Delete it, Favorite it, perform a variety of different actions on it. You can also upload new photos. So you can select photos from the local drive and upload them to include them in your photos library. In the Drive App you can see all of the files in your iCloud Drive. So you've got Recent, you can browse, you're always here in Icon View which is kind of unfortunate. There's no List View. Maybe something for the future. But you can select a file. Get information on that file and sort in various ways. You can download files to the local machine, share them by email.

Now here is where it gets really interesting. There are also web-based versions of the Pages, Numbers, and Keynote Apps. So if you have a document like this, its a Pages document. I can double-click it and you can see it is going to open up a new tab or window depending upon your settings. It will load the document up in the web-based version of Pages. It looks very much like Pages. A little more like the iPad version of Pages than the Mac version of Pages. But you can see how you can still select text, set Styles, and do all sorts of things here. It's not a full featured as Pages on the Mac but has a lot of the functionality. What this allows you to do is actually view and edit Pages, Numbers, and Keynote documents in a web browser. Even if you are not on a Mac. So if you collaborate with somebody and you've got Pages on a Mac but they're on Windows they can still use the web-based version of Pages and then collaborate with you using this document even though they have no way to run Pages on their Windows computer. 

Other file text can be viewed as well. For instance an image will simply open up as the image itself. A pdf file like this will open up in Safari and you can view it as a pdf like that. Now back here at the Dashboard you'll also find a list of apps. So if you wanted to you could go right into one of these apps without opening a document first. For instance I can launch the Numbers web app here and you can see I can browse my recents in Numbers or create a new document from a template and then work in Numbers in a very similar environment to the Numbers app on the Mac or iPad. These apps are regularly updated including the latest features. You can see the Numbers app here even has the ability to Pivot Table which is a fairly recent addition to Numbers. Here you can see the Notes web app I can right into a Note here and I can Edit and Add To a Note. Look through my folders for different notes.

Now as I mentioned before this Dashboard page here is all new. It looks very different on how it did a short time ago and it is customizable. So you've got at the bottom Customize Home Page. You can click that and you could see that all these wiggle and you've got these Minus Buttons here. So I could remove something, like let's say I could remove Photos from the Dashboard. I could also Add something. So I add Tile and you can see all the different things I could add. I could add Photos back. I could also add Calendar. I could add Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I could add Hide My Email, and Custom Domain Controls. I can add the List of Apps. So all the panels available here can be removed and added. When they are added they are added here to the beginning. But you could drag them around to reorder them. Note here how you have a pattern of a square, followed by a rectangle, and the next line a rectangle followed by a square and so on. So if I want a Drive to be larger and Calendar to be smaller I can drag Drive to the left. Now you can see I have a rectangular drive-dashboard element and a square Calendar dashboard element. You could also click Edit here and simply swap one dashboard element for another. When you are done customizing this you can click Done here at the top. 

Note in addition to this set of apps here as one of the dashboard elements, you could also click here to access all of them. Including some that are not dashboard elements. For instance, Find My is not included as a dashboard element but you could click here to use that. Using Find My is one of the primary uses for iCloud.com because if you have lost your iPhone and you're not near any of your other Apple devices you can now use somebody else's phone or computer to log into iCloud.com, go to Find My and locate your lost iPhone or iPad, or Mac. 

Now this first dashboard element here gives you access to a lot of your Settings. You click in here you'll see your Apple ID and some settings for that. You'll see Settings for various different iCloud things. At the top you'll see tabs for going to your iCloud plan. You'll see the use of your iCloud storage. Your iCloud Plus features if you have that. Data Recovery features you can restore recently deleted files, bookmarks, contacts, and calendars using iCloud.com. Notice here that a lot of these dashboard elements have the ability to create new items like you can compose a new Mail message by clicking here. You can add a new event to the Calendar by clicking the Plus button at the top right. The same thing for a new Note. You even have a Plus button at the top right here. Click that and you can see all the things you can do like Write a New Email Message, a new Note, Calendar Event, Reminder, or new document in one of these three apps. 

Now here are some things to know about using iCloud.com. First, it should work on any modern browser. Now officially Apple supports Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Opera. If you get the latest versions of those then iCloud.com should work on them. Even some of the older versions it should work just fine and also some other browsers. As long as the browser is modern enough and using web standards iCloud.com should work on it. Now you may be wondering why use iCloud.com at all. After all you can access all this information using the native apps on your Mac, your iPad, or your iPhone. However there maybe situations where you need to access your iCloud data outside of those devices. For instance let's say you're just away from all your Apple devices for whatever reason you've left all of them at home, you're out on the go, and you need to access something. Now as long as you have access to a computer you trust, say a friend's computer, you can logon and get some services even without two-character authentication. For instance you can use Find My Devices because, obviously you might need to do that without having your iPhone or any other device with you to get the second factor. Most of the stuff you can't actually access without that second factor. But sometimes it is possible to have your iPhone with you and not be able to access your iCloud stuff. Like for instance you could be traveling and have access to SMS messages. Get your second factor there and then use iCloud.com to log onto a trusted computer to access your iCloud email, your Notes, your Reminders, Photos, and all of that. 

Now another situation is that you have an iPhone but you don't have a Mac. There are millions of people in that category. Well, let's say you want to access something on a desktop on say your Windows or Lynx machine. Well you can do that using iCloud.com. It may just be easier to handle your iCloud email or your Notes or look through your Photos on a desktop machine in a web browser than it is on your phone in that particular situation. Now it also often happens that you have a Mac but it is your personal Mac and at work you have a different Mac with a different Apple ID or you're using a Windows of Lynx machine and you want to access your personal stuff. So you can use iCloud.com even in a private browsing window to temporarily log into your iCloud account, check your email, look at the data in your other apps. Even download or upload files from that computer to or from your iCloud Account. 

Now another situation maybe that you have no Apple devices at all. But you wish to work in iCloud a little bit. Say, collaborating with somebody on a Pages, Numbers, or Keynote document. When you go to sign-in at iCloud.com you do have the option to create an Apple ID. So even if you have nothing to do with Apple products you can create an Apple ID and use that to collaborate with Apple users. These are called Web Only iCloud Accounts. They have a very tiny 1GB limit on files since you don't own any Apple devices. But at least Apple does let you actually get an Apple ID for free and  use that to work with others. 

Another reason you may want to use iCloud.com is simply to look at something in another iCloud Account. Maybe you have two. One personal account and one work account and you can log on to the other account without having to log out of iCloud on your Mac. You can just use your web browser for it. Another use for iCloud.com is looking at content like files in the Drive App, or photos in the Photos App to see what is there. When you're working at syncing problems between your Macs it is useful to look here because this is actually showing you what is on the server. So, if you have a file on your Mac you don't see it on your iPhone in the files app. At that point you don't know whether it is stuck on your Mac and hasn't gone to iCloud Drive or whether it is in iCloud Drive and simply hasn't gone down to your iPhone. But by checking here at iCloud.com you could see clearly which files are there on the server and know whether it is a problem uploading the file or simply a problem downloading the file to your device. The same thing, say, for the photos in your Photos Library. 

Now there are actually a few features at iCloud.com that you don't really have access to anywhere else. Most notably in Mail if you go into the Mail App you can go to Settings by clicking on the Settings button here, then Preferences, and then you've got things like Auto-Reply and Rules that work differently because you are now at the Server level. So if you setup a Rule here at iCloud.com Mail it works at the Server level before the email is delivered to your various devices. This is really useful because if you setup a rule say on your Mac but the email happens to come to your iPhone while say your Mac is shutdown, well those rules will never get a chance to be applied because your Mac didn't actually get a chance to look at the message. But, if you setup Rules here at the Server level that will be done here and will apply to all of your devices. That's why I always recommend if you want to use Rules with your iCloud.com email address set them up here at iCloud.com not in the Mail App on your Mac. Also, the Auto-Reply function is very useful as well. These auto-replies would work at the Server level so even if all your devices are off-line it would still auto-reply to people that try to message you.

So here's what I recommend. Even if you don't think you have a use for iCloud.com I say check it out now. Give it a look. See what it can do. Look at your data in iCloud.com so you know what's possible because if you do need it in the future in one of those situations you don't want it to be the first time you've ever looked at iCloud.com. You want to know what to expect beforehand. So take the time to checkout iCloud.com. Even if you've done it in the past there's the whole new look to it now. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.