Tips: Sharing Photo's with Apple's PhotoStream

Dec 19

The holidays are coming fast, with it brings many precious memories.

With Instagram's change to it's terms of service many people will be rethinking how they share their memories. I thought I would share how my family and I share our memories and suggest another alternative which we use exclusivly.

Apple's PhotoStream

Has come a long way and may be over looked by some.

What I like about this service is the ability to lock down who can view the images if I wish. Now I must admit if you intend on locking things down you are locked into Apple's ecosystem.. Meaning everyone who you want to share with must have an Apple account.

All that being said, here are some personal examples of how my family and I use share our memories with PhotoStream.

Both of my boys have individual galleries on there iPod touches. When creating these gallery we used the share options and added family members like their GrandParents back in NY and other family members around the world as well as my wife and I. Now every time they take a picture they can share it by adding it to their shared gallery. Once this is done everyone that was given access to this gallery will recive push notifications on all there Apple products i.e. Mobile and Desktop devices. The other nice thing about PhotoStream is it does have a social aspect to it. Where people can leave comments about any photo. As well as being notified of comments and or replies via Push notifications.

A big selling point in photo sharing for me is knowing who had access to view my image's. Now there is an option to publish a gallery publicly which in turn would give you a URL that you can share. I must say the public gallery is laid out very nicely. Now there is no control on it's layout or design but it does a really nice job at it.

I will also note my boys are ages 7 & 6 and PhotoStream makes it easy enough for them to share images with our family.

If they can do it so could you and best of all it's free…

I've included a quick walkthrough of creating sharing a PhotoStream gallery.

photophoto streamapple

Thomas Fraley

I am a tech enthusiast whose main focus is making technology easy again for everyone. Educated with degrees in network engineering and project management. I've worked in the entertainment industry for a decade as a director of information technology for global companies pioneering the way. A few years ago I decided to give back and have been helping young entrepreneur startups off on the right foot.