Take, Sync, and Share Photos - iConnected: Use AirPlay, iCloud, Apps, and More to Bring Your Apple Devices Together - page 95

Figure 5-3
Editing Photo Stream settings on a Mac
On a Mac, the Photo Stream images appear in the iPhoto app that comes with new Macs, in the
Photo Stream section. (You will need to buy a copy from the Mac App Store if you don't have it prein-
stalled.) Windows PC users' Photo Stream images are stored in their My Pictures folder by default, al-
though you can set a different location for the photos via the iCloud control panel's Options button.
Once you have switched on Photo Stream on your iOS device, you'll notice that a new section is
available in the Photos app. Unsurprisingly, it's called Photo Stream, and it includes any photos you
have taken with your device in the last 30 days or since Photo Stream was turned on — whichever
comes last.
These photos also appear on any of your other devices linked to the same iCloud account that
also have Photo Stream turned on. You can think of this Photo Stream section as a shared gallery of
all the pictures you have taken. As you take them, your device uploads them to Apple's iCloud server
(if you have an Internet connection, of course) and then downloads them to your other Photo
Stream-enabled devices (again, if they're connected to the Internet).
Photo Stream's syncing approach also means that deleting a picture from the Photo Stream on
any device deletes the picture from all your other devices, too. So if you want to keep a copy of an im-
age permanently, copy it to a folder on your Mac from iPhoto or copy it to a different folder on your
PC — those copies out of Photo Stream's default locations are not deleted when you delete the image
from a Photo Stream location.
TIP: Uploading and downloading photos over a cellular connection can eat up your data plan
quickly. Which is why iOS devices don't do that — they only upload and download Photo Stream im-
ages when they have a Wi-Fi connection to the Internet. But if you use the Shared Photo Stream fea-
ture described later in this chapter, it does use cellular connections, and the only way to stop that is
to turn off the feature in the iCloud pane of the Settings app: Tap Photo Streaming to see the settings.