Now that we’re officially into the holiday season, it’s time we all learned to use Shared Photo Streams. Undoubtedly, you took a wide variety of pictures with your favorite iOS device over Thanksgiving weekend – food pictures, mostly – and you want to share them with friends and family. Well, that’s easy, you say – I’ll simply upload them to Facebook or Instagram! And while you will certainly do that, there are a few situations in which that isn’t the best option. Believe it or not, you’ll still run across the occasional family member without a Facebook account (are they behind the curve or ahead of it?), and Instagram certainly isn’t the best way to showcase an album of photographs. Another Facebook-unfriendly use case is when family members may actually want to use your pictures. They can save them to their own hard drives from Facebook, certainly, but that’s neither convenient or intuitive. Finally, what if you just don’t want your hundreds (thousands?) of Facebook friends weighing in on the hilarity of a particular set of photos? Sometimes it’s better to just share with a few people.
Shared Photo Streams is probably one of the major sleepers among the updates that came with iOS 6. While it’s a fantastically useful feature in the right set of circumstances, it doesn’t have that “wow” factor flashy updates have, and its plethora of use cases simply aren’t immediately evident. First off, let’s talk compatibility. Shared Photo Streams work on…everything. Okay, not all devices, but anyone can receive them, and anyone with an iCloud account can send them. Photo Streams can be created and shared via iPhoto or Aperture on a Mac, the iCloud Control Panel on a PC, and, of course, any iOS device running iOS 6. They can be received and viewed using all of the devices mentioned above, or any device with a web browser. For an iCloud product, that is a wide array of compatibility.
So how does it work? Thankfully, it’s pretty straightforward. From a single photo, touch the “Share” icon, and choose “Photo Stream.” For a group of photos, touch “Edit” and select the photos you want to share, choose the “Share” button, and choose “Photo Stream.” There doesn’t appear to be any limit to the number of photos you can share (I currently have one stream with 80 photos in it), and you can always add more photos later on. So, if you start with ten photos, take some more and want to add those as well, you can do so. Your recipients will receive a notification and the photos will be added to the Photo Stream in real time. Once you’ve chosen to share your photos with a Photo Stream, you’ll see a very familiar looking box that will allow you to add contacts or e-mail addresses to share the stream with. Any subsequent pictures you add this same Photo Stream will be shared with these same contacts. Finally, at the bottom, there’s a toggle switch, defaulted to “off,” that allows you to send your Photo Stream photos to a public URL hosted at iCloud.com.
Once the photos have been shared, the recipients have a couple of Facebook-like options for interacting with and commenting on the pictures. First, there is the blatant Facebook rip-off “Like” option, the only difference being that the “Like” icon is a smiley face instead of a thumbs up. In addition to being able to like photos, recipients can also comment on them, with notifications sent to the Photo Stream owner that comments have been made.
And that’s it! It really doesn’t get much easier. At our recent family Thanksgiving, between my seven siblings, my wife and daughters, my parents, and my sister’s husband, there were a total of five iPhones, two iPod Touches, two iPads, and two Macs, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get some Photo Stream action started. The process was seamless, and the photos we didn’t feel the need to share on Facebook, we were still free to laugh about amongst ourselves! Perhaps most conveniently, for those of us that wanted to use the photos for our own photo libraries, prints, and other applications, there was no transferring of files or e-mailing to do – they were just there. As Phil Schiller might say, “So, that’s Shared Photo Streams.”
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