Apple’s original cloud photo sync service is shutting down this summer
The end of My Photo Stream won’t come as much of a surprise. Although it was free, it came with one long list of restrictions on the number of photos you could upload, and they were only kept on Apple’s servers for 30 days. Photos stored in the cloud then had to be manually saved locally if you wanted to keep them on a secondary device and, perhaps worst of all, 9to5Mac notes that high quality photos are not synced in their original resolution.
iCloud’s free storage may be relatively limited at only 5 GB, but at least it works as a modern cloud storage service with photos and videos stored in their full resolution.
Apple’s support page says that new photo uploads to My Photo Stream will end on June 26, and the feature will disappear completely a month later. “The photos in My Photo Stream are already stored on at least one of your devices,” the Apple page notes, “So as long as you have the device with your originals, you won’t lose any photos as part of this process.”