MacMost Now 810: Public Shared Photo Streams

Learn how to set up and use public shared Photo Streams. You can post pictures from iPhoto on your Mac or from the Photos app on your iPhone or other iOS device. Others can see your photos by just knowing the URL, or you could link to your own Photo Stream from your home page or social network.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's take a look at public Photo Streams.
So back with MobileMe we had photo galleries and we were able to easily share photos with friends. But now with iCloud we have public shared photo streams and we can just as easily share photos not only from our Macs but also from our iOS devices.
So here I am at iPhoto on my Mac and I turned on Photo Stream. That happened the first time I went to Photo Stream and it prompted me to turn it on. You can also go and check in Preferences under Photo Stream, make sure you have it turned on. Also make sure you have on Shared Photo Streams since we want to share some photos.
Now I'm going to go to my photos here and I'm going to start a photo stream by first selecting some images. So let me select the first theree here and then I'm going to hit the share button and I'm going to say I want to share using Photo Stream.
I can share them to My Photo Stream. That's the normal photo stream that we've had since the beginning of iCloud but what I want to do is to create a new photo stream. Here I can give some email addresses to some people I want to tell about this photo stream. I can name it and I can also check off to make it public. So now it is something I can share with just sending somebody a URL.
So let me hit share it will create this photo stream for me. If I look under Web/Photo Stream you can see that I've got My Photo Stream there and I've also got a photo stream call Sample Photos.
So let's take a closer look at that. I'm going to double click on that to select it and I can see information in here about which photos are there. I can also add comments to it by just clicking on this little comment button here and I can also go back to the main photos and I still have the information window selected and you turn that on and off by hitting info here. I can see that I've got a URL for that photo stream. So I can actually click on that and it will launch Safari and it will bring up that page with those photos. I can now select this, copy and paste that URL to an email or post it on a website so that anybody can go and view these photos.
You can see back here in iPhoto there are also other things. Here I can change, for instance, the name and the description of it. I can share with more by simply clicking in here and then typing other names of contacts or email addresses. I can turn off the Public Shared setting for this Photo Stream if I wanted to.
On the website here if we dig down, I've added some more photos here, and let's say let's click on a photo. We can see that we can play kind of a slide show. We can go back and forth between each photo. We can even download the photo there and we can go to a full screen version of this while still all in the Safari browser. We can go back to the sample photos here and you can see that it has added them kind of as a pattern that it puts them there on the main screen at least until you click on one to dig down and view them one by one.
You can see here on my iPhone I am viewing a picture here in the Photos App. I can hit the share button and from there I can select Photo Stream and I get something very similar. I'm using a different but I can create a new photo stream, give it a new name and choose to have it on a public website just as before. Or I can simply select a Photo Stream that is already there and add it to it. So I can do the same thing here in iOS.
So Public Shared Photo Streams are a quick and easy tool to use. Both easy for you, there's not really many options you just create one and go and also for the end user. It is very easy for them to view the photos and download them if they want to.
So it is a good, quick photo sharing tool and it is just part of iCloud so you probably already have it.
Hope you found this useful. Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 810: Public Shared Photo Streams”

Steve

12 years ago

What if the person you want to share the photo with doesn't have a mac or an ios device? Will they be able to see the photos?

Gary Rosenzweig

They display on a web page. You can view it with anything that uses a modern web browser.

Russ

Does the iPhoto on the iPhone or iPad handle photostream like on the iPhoto for Mac?

No. The Photos app is what you use for Photo Stream. But iPhoto has its own thing: Photo Journals. See http://macmost.com/journals-in-iphoto-for-ios.html

I have iPhoto 11 (9.4.2) and running Mac v10.7.5 Lion. I don't see the same things in iPhoto that you show. I guess I need Mountain Lion?? Well, my 2006 MAc Pro is still running great but I can't put Mountain Lion on it :-(. I guess I'll wait to see if some new MAc Pros come out this year.

Thim Fook, Law

Much thanks for this tutorial, Gary. It has been very helpful. But how does one prevent the invited viewers from downloading the pictures? Plus, is there a way for the viewers to add comments to the photos?

Thanks in advance.

You can't on either. It just is what it is. I guess the idea is that this if for true family and friends -- if you don't want them to download then you shouldn't be sharing with them in the first place. As for comments, I guess if want more functionality, then try another service (Flickr, Picasa, etc etc) there are tons of services to use, all with their own feature set.

As usual, Gary, much thanks for your reply. Guess there's a logic behind it, but I think it's still helpful to have that 'download' option. Hmmm, maybe it's a good idea to submit this suggestion to Apple.

Regards.

Anna

I don't see that Aperture has a way to share photos in the icloud. Is there a setting I can't find, or will it be available in a future update for Aperture?
Thanks!

According to Apple, Aperture 3.4 or newer supports Shared Photo Streams.

Michael Schaffer

Thanks for the informative video. I too was excited to use the new Photo Stream galleries, as I was outraged that Apple eliminated the Mobile Me ones. But I was distressed to realized that shared galleries are only available for people with Mountain Lion, and my aging MacPro is officially too old to go beyond 10.7. Are there any work-arounds? I have been using the DropBox galleries as a substitute, but they are not as attractive.

They are "available" to everyone -- but I think you mean you can only create them with Mountain Lion. Yes, they are a new feature of Mountain Lion. Apple can't go back in time and add them to Lion. And if they added all of the Mountain Lion features to Lion, well... they did: Mountain Lion.
But I get what you are saying that your Mac is too old to use Mountain Lion. So something to look forward to after your next upgrade, I guess. Or use an alternative like DropBox, Flickr, Picasa, or any of the dozens of other services.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 810: Public Shared Photo Streams

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 810: Public Shared Photo Streams”

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