Flickr has made a significant update to its iOS app, revamping the look to mimic that of your iPhone’s Camera Roll and bringing the auto-upload feature added back in 2013 front-and-center. When you first run the app, it immediately asks if you want to automatically upload every photo you take. If you say yes, photos are set to private, so you won’t be sharing them with the world.
With Flickr offering 1TB of free storage, and a typical iPhone photo coming in at around 2.5Mb, that gives you capacity in the order of half a million photos … Expand Expanding Close
Apple yesterday released a preview of its upcoming all-new Photos app for Mac, which replaces iPhoto and Aperture with a simpler all-in-one photo editor and library manager. Most of the discussion of Photos focused on the huge number of changes from iPhoto and Aperture, burying one very important detail: Apple is changing the way it handles cloud-based photo storage.
Before Photos, Apple offered free storage of photos with limitations in a feature called Photo Stream, which didn’t count against iCloud storage. But the new Photos app uses Apple’s beta iCloud Photo Library feature, which was recently added in iOS 8.1. iCloud Photo Library promises to let you synchronize your entire photo collection including edits and albums across all of your devices… but you have to share your iCloud storage with photos, and album syncing and edits don’t apply to the free 1,000 – 25,000 image storage of Photo Stream.
As most long-time iOS users know, the free 5GB of iCloud storage Apple offers is often not enough to store much more than a single device backup, and for many that will mean no spare room for a photo collection. Consequently, Apple is suggesting that users should buy additional iCloud storage, paying monthly fees to store and sync their photos. As the Photos app is rolling out, Apple is allowing users to stick with the old Photo Stream feature and continue using the new Photos app without turning on the iCloud Photo Library. But it remains to be seen if that will be an option long-term once Photos is released publicly and how users will respond when they find out their free 5GB iCloud storage isn’t cutting it for their photo collection…
With iOS 8, Apple will now backup of all your photos. The limitations of Photo Stream seem to have gone away. Apple will now store all of your photos in iCloud, regardless of what device you take them on. iPhones and iPads can view these entire libraries, without having to download them to local storage. The photos stream in as you scroll.
Storage is only limited by your iCloud Storage. Apple has announced new cheaper storage plans to go along with the new philosophy.
Apple is also adding a whole host of color and other editing features into the Photos app. This includes things like color correction, brightness, cropping and more. These edits automatically sync across devices.
MyPhotostream is a simple, standalone Mac app for viewing your pictures from Photo Stream without having to open the mammoth of an app that iPhoto has become.
This app removes a major point of friction for me, and I’m guessing I’m not alone. Open iPhoto and it’s loading your image library, checking location data, updating Photo Stream and Shared Photo Streams, and who knows what else. If you’re viewing iPhoto in full-screen (as it best appears in my opinion) and you have a camera or iOS device connected, it will pull you back to a desktop view and take over the screen with a modal import prompt (even if auto-import is disabled); it’s a mess.
MyPhotostream digs your Photo Stream photos out of the mess and presents them in a simple, customizable grid view. Expand Expanding Close
Today’s update to the iOS Flickr app offers auto-uploading of full-res photos to your private Flickr gallery. Couple this to the 1TB of free storage available and you effectively have a Photo Stream style service that can store over half a million photos, rather than simply the last 1,000.
Flickr introduced the 1TB capacity back in May (with parent company Yahoo offering the same free storage to email users yesterday). If you sync iPhoto with Flickr, you effectively get all the benefits of Photo Stream but with 500 times the capacity. You do need to be careful with this, however: the sync is two-way, so if you delete photos from Flickr, they will also be deleted from iPhoto … Expand Expanding Close
Amazon today released an iPhone version of its Amazon Cloud Drive Photos mobile app that it originally launched on Android only back in November. Amazon;’s Cloud Drive Photos app for iPhone, like the Android version, will allow users to back up and view photos to their Amazon Cloud Drive accounts. Up until today, iOS device users have only had access to Amazon’s Cloud Player app for streaming music stored in an Amazon cloud account.
The app provides everything a user might need to ditch Apple’s less than perfect iCloud Photostream feature, including the ability to automatically save photos taken on your iPhone to Cloud Drive, access your entire Cloud Drive photo collection from any device, and easily share through social networks.
Update: Apple has reported that all problems are now resolved with outages having lasted from 5:35 p.m. to 6:49 p.m.:
Apple’s system status page is showing that some users are experiencing problems with iCloud and may not be able to access a number of services, including: Mail, Contacts, Photo Stream, Calendar, Reminders, Backup, and more. iMessage and other services, such as the App Store and iTunes, remain online. Apple’s recently updated system status page shows that the outages started happening around 5:30 p.m. EST.
Late last week Apple confirmed and quickly fixed issues that some users were having with being unable to access iCloud documents, Photo Stream, back up and restore, and iMessage. We’ll keep you posted.
We know our readers have a love/hate relationship with mockups, but we think these are worth sharing due to all the rumors of a 4-inch iPhone coming this October, It does not seem like a ton of math went into these mockups to ensure an easy transition of existing iOS apps to a larger screen iPhone, but they certainly help us picture what a 4-inch iPhone could look like.
The first three images above come from 9to5Mac reader and design student Daniel Bautista. Like our own 4-inch iPhone mockup, these were inspired by Photo Stream leaks from last summer. The image on the far-right above (and the image below) is another mockup from apfelpage.de that shows a slimmed down next-gen iPhone with a touch-sensitive home button running a widget-enabled iOS 6.
