iCloud numpty question

[pincher]

Sorry if this is a bit of a basic question but I don’t use iCloud, even though I am ‘Appled up’, so don’t really know the answer and was looking for a plain-English answer, rather than tons of Apple-speak

My niece is off to Aus for a year this weekend and she has a large number of pictures on her iPhone already (~4000 apparently) – she wants to move all these off her phone so she can use it out there without running out of memory.

I guess that she could just buy an external hard drive and back them all up to that before deleting them - but if she signed up to additional iCloud storage, could she upload them all to that and then delete them off her phone? Do they stay in iCloud indefinitely, or do they get removed after a certain amount of time?

I presume she could also set her phone to auto-upload any new pics to her iCloud account whilst she is away, so if she fills up the phone, she could just delete them from there and they wouldn’t be lost?

[SlidingSideways]

Is she syncing her photos with iClouds photo stream?
The standard stream is a rolling 30day/1000 item online store of the photos you take with your phone.

However, photos can be moved to "Shared streams" which, while each still having the 1000 picture limit, allow the pictures to stay there indefinitely.
You can have up to 100 shared streams, so room for 100,000 photos.

The really good news about this method is that photo streams don't count against your iCloud storage space, so she won't need to pay for an upgrade.

More details here:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4316368
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4858

NB - I'd still recommend making a copy of the stuff already on the phone though if it's important for here. Cloud services aren't infallible.

[pincher]

Thanks for that - so are you saying that she could set up an initial 4 shared streams and upload her 4000 existing pics to these streams and then delete them from her Camera Roll and they would always still be available in her streams?

[SlidingSideways]

Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Might take some time though as you have to do it all through the Photos app in iOS as I can't see a way to do it via the iCloud website.

[pincher]

Thanks for your suggestion - much appreciated

However, in true PH style I have completely ignored you and gone down another route entirely

Told her to get the Flickr app, sign up for an account (think you get 1TB as standard now) and make sure Auto upload is on, so that anything she takes a pic of now goes into Flickr straight away.

Also told her to download CameraSync to do a bulk upload of all her existing pics to Flickr - it will cost her a couple of quid for that app but seems like a whole lot less fannying around

If that doesn't work, I'm for the high jump!

Edited by pincher on Wednesday 17th September 16:29

[chris.mapey]

Plug the phone into any computer - 'trust' that computer, don't sync, but then the phone will appear as a digital camera, and the images can be downloaded easily into your photo processing program (or just a folder) of choice.

[andygo]

How does that work? Just done it with my iphone but it doesn't appear on my mac or itunes as a digi camera or ext storage device.

[MrCarPark]

andygo said:

How does that work? Just done it with my iphone but it doesn't appear on my mac or itunes as a digi camera or ext storage device.

I do it through Graphic Converter, which is a handy graphics tool to have on a Mac.

Easy enough. File>Acquire>Choose Images...

[Dracoro]

andygo said:

How does that work? Just done it with my iphone but it doesn't appear on my mac or itunes as a digi camera or ext storage device.

Image capture or iPhoto will both do he job of importing.

[pincher]

chris.mapey said:

Plug the phone into any computer - 'trust' that computer, don't sync, but then the phone will appear as a digital camera, and the images can be downloaded easily into your photo processing program (or just a folder) of choice.

Could do but ideally she wanted to be able to access all her 'home' pics whilst out in Aus.

[NDA]

pincher said:

Could do but ideally she wanted to be able to access all her 'home' pics whilst out in Aus.

Flickr is a pretty good solution.

I like Apple hardware, but am always less than comfortable with how tricky it is to get your data back out once you've put it in.

[pincher]

NDA said:

Flickr is a pretty good solution.

I like Apple hardware, but am always less than comfortable with how tricky it is to get your data back out once you've put it in.

Agree on both points

[pincher]

Aaaaaaaand ios8 borks the auto upload to Flickr - presumably because there is no camera roll now

Good job I told her to hold off updating from ios7 before she flies out.

I love Apple stuff but hate it when they 'fix' things that weren't actually broken in the first place