Apple has updated the beta version of its iCloud Photos web app with support for uploading images to a user’s iCloud Photo Library. The feature will likely roll out soon to everyone on the public version of the service soon, but for now is limited to the beta site.
The change adds a single “Upload” button to the upper-right corner of the page, which shows a standard image picker when clicked. From there, users are presented with the progress indicator seen above, and the image becomes available on all of their devices. At this time, video uploads don’t appear to be supported.
The introduction of this feature is likely to help serve as a stopgap while Mac users await the availability of the promised Photos for Mac app, which is set to debut next year. At that time, Aperture and iPhoto will be discontinued and the new application will provide native support for iCloud Photo Library and other features currently found in the iOS Photos app.
iMovie for iOS was also updated with support for iCloud Photo Library today as well as the ability to share videos to the service.
What’s New in Version 2.1.1
• Support for iCloud Photo Library beta
• Share videos with iCloud Photo Sharing
• Resolves issues that could occur when rotating a device while in the Video browser
• Performance and stability improvements
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with all the changes apple is going through for its photography apps, I downloaded Lightroom 5. Adobe has creative cloud which is somehow confusingly linked to Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CC, but storage is questionable and I am not sure if it allows for editing of a photograph on your iMac for instance and then seeing the result on your macbook pro, etc.. Any thoughts from the photography community about what apps to use i.e. wait for what Apple is coming out with vs going with and figuring out the Adobe LR/PS pathway?
Thanks
I’m waiting. It’s not like I’m at some kind of stalemate where Aperture doesn’t work anymore. It’s fine and could certainly be better. I do most heavy editing with 3rd party plugins anyhow, like those from Nik.
What good is it(photo uploads) with mere 5GB of storage for free? With Amazon’s Prime, at least I’m getting a lot in return including free movies, music, books, 2-day shipping and now unlimited photo/video uploads for the $99/year which is $20 less than Apple’s 500GB storage. Apple needs to lower their prices further, IMHO.
Maybe some people need OS level integration of their photo library as well as other documents. You don’t get that with Amazon.
i think the photo store is unlimited (or will be).
Might work for you, but for other people in other countries–like me, that option doesn’t work.
On my iPhone 6 I dont have support for iCloud Photo Library but I do have for iCloud Drive, since the latest update, which dont have any of my videoes in it. I have dozens of videos in iCloud Photo Library..
I´m confused…
Anyone knows if ID3-tags are uploaded too? Have a lot of old pictures on my Mac, and they shall appear on my iPhone and iPad correctly with gps data and so on. Thanks for reply!
yes, photos are preserved in their original form, with all metadata. There currently is a bug, though, where iCloud Photos reads TIFF date-time info, instead of EXIF. This means that photos often show up at the time where you edited them on your computer, instead of at the original date, if you don’t sync TIFF dates. (this is possible with Photo Meta Edit.)
I would like to move all my photos to iCloud Photo Library but I have one big concern. My iPhone is 16Gb version, you can guess how precious space is. My photos are actually over 20Gb. I know that choosing optimise for iPhone/iPad will leave only optimised version at the devices. Still keeping that many photos, no matter how optimised they are, will eat up much space I am afraid. Does anybody have information/experience how iCloud Photo Library treats photos. Let’s say I have 2.000 photos. Will it keep 2.000 optimised photos in the devices? Or will keep last months photos in optimised form and the rest of them just as thumbnails until I click on them. The latter might be good as it will keep how much space photos will use under control in a way.
Does anyone know the difference of iCloud Photo Library, iTunes Backup and iCloud Backup? If we use iCloud backup, is there any need to use iCloud Photo Library to backup?
Yeah Apple has made it confusing. I think the main difference is that iCloud Photo Library lets you keep and edit your pics across all your devices. And browsing the pics seems to be pretty nice. iCloud Drive is more for storage, although from what I can tell, none of their Cloud services are a true cloud like PictureLife where you can delete your pics from your devices and it is still in the cloud. Apple needs to keep working on this.
The good the bad and the ugly related to the new Photos app and the iCloud Photo library which no one is talking about:
1. The good. It allows for full backup of your entire library, which is a good thing for folks who don’t take the time to back up their hard drives any other way. The ability to view all pictures on all platforms, the ability to edit and have it “pushed” to all your devices, but there is a caveat and it comes at price which needs to be measured carefully.
2. The bad. Large photo libraries will take a long, long, long time to upload, If you have a lot of pictures in your camera rolls, even longer. I ended up having to download my entire camera roll via Image Capture so that the process would continue. If you have a slow upload speed through your ISP, be prepared to wait a long time as well. I uploaded a library of over 35,000 pictures.
3. The ugly. Zero privacy and control over what you upload. Your entire library, all your albums get uploaded, as well as all your pictures. This mean that if you have pictures/albums that you would prefer not to have in iCloud, you need to move them to another space. This is self defeating in having Photos as your central repository for all your pictures. Gone is the ability to control which albums you want to sync across all devices and which you want to remain private. We’ll see if Apple changes this is the future releases, but I don’t think so. The fact that you have to refresh each album that downloads to your device manually in order to view the contents. Again, if you have a large library with a lot of albums, be prepared to take a lot of time doing this. You have to keep the album open, and constantly scroll through it for pics to download (my experience), it does not refresh automatically. The fact that all your pictures are pushed to your devices has created havoc with my iPad (128GB) and my Iphone 6 Plus (64gb). Both devices now show 100% occupied space, with pictures taking up almost 99% of the space. Not what I was expecting. Although the usage on the actual device shows less, iTunes appears not to be taking to Photos to sync this correctly. This resulted in having to turn off the iCloud switch, and restore the iPad from scratch, as I cannot eliminate the space which was taken up originally by the iCloud Library. Again, my take on the experience, but the hype, and the solution, is not for everyone.