Photography is also can be one of the ways people communicate with each other. Very often we use photos when we want to share some special emotions with your friends or relatives. Every modern smartphone has a camera (as well most mobile phones) and it’s much faster and easier to make a photo than to write an SMS or email.
Some 5-7 years ago when there were no smartphones I used MMS for sending images (I think, that was the only way to quickly send images). Later MMS changed into email. A couple of years ago I began to use Dropbox. And now I use Photo Stream for about a year. This Apple service allows you to sync your photos among different devices used under one Apple ID. Here’re some basic facts about its work.
There’s a central storage in the iCloud called Photo Stream. All the pictures made with iPhone, iPad or added to the iPhoto from your camera get there. When one of the above mentioned devices is connected to the Internet, all photos get into a general Photo Stream. And from there they are uploaded on all connected devices.
For example, you make a picture with your iPhone on your way home, and when you’re home you can already work with it on your PC. So this is a quite convenient way of photo transferring without using any cables. You don’t need to install any additional software, and the feature is activated with a couple of simple actions.
Surely, the main audience of this application is Apple users. They don’t have to do anything, just select the photos to share in the iOS gallery, create an album and send invitations to everyone on their Apple IDs. The Photo Stream can be either public, when anyone can see the photos in the album, or private, when only invited users can see the photos.
If you use not only Apple devices (for example, at home you have a PC under Windows), then you’ll get access only to partial functionality. In order to use Photo Stream you’ll need to install iCloud Control Panel for Windows, and after that you’ll be able to upload photos to your computer. Or, to be correct, your photos will upload automatically. Unfortunately, you won’t be able comment and like photos in the general Photo Stream.
After installing this add-on for Windows, there will appear a folder on your PC called “Photo Stream”, where you photos will be situated in the form of folders within this folder. The only disadvantage, in my opinion, is that in order for your photo to get into a Photo Stream from your PC you can’t just add it to the “My Photo Stream” folder. Instead, you need to use a folder “Uploads”. The photos added to this folder will appear in your personal Photo Stream.
All other users can watch the pictures from Photo Stream in any browser. The platform and mobile operating system don’t matter as well. So you can watch Photo Stream on your Android or Windows Phone device. Well, you can’t invite such users into your private Photo Stream and they won’t be able to like or comment photos. But nevertheless, it’s important that they will see these photos.
To crown it all, I can say that the technologies and services Apple offers are not as close as some users say. With minimum efforts any user can use Photo Stream.
 About the Author: Eugene Rudenko
Author’s bio: Eugene Rudenko is a copywriter for IT company Intellectsoft (company’s site http://www.intellectsoft.net/). Intellectsoft is a world-known mobile app developer and is a preferred Apple (UK) supplier.