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Introduction to iCloud Photo Library

Aug 20, 2015

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Photos for OS X and iOS: Take, edit, and share photos in the Apple photography ecosystem

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Set Up iCloud Photo Library

In true Apple fashion, turning on iCloud Photo Library is almost a one-click operation. Here’s how to enable it in Photos for OS X and Photos for iOS, plus the settings you need to be aware of to make it work well.

Photos for OS X

To get iCloud Photo Library working on your Mac, do the following:

First, you need to be signed in to iCloud. If you’re not already, open System Preferences, click the iCloud icon, and enter your Apple ID and password. You can also reach the same point from the preferences window in the Photos application, under iCloud.
In Photos, go to the iCloud preferences window and click the iCloud Photo Library checkbox (4.4). Once it’s enabled, Photos begins uploading the contents of your library to iCloud.

4.4 Enable iCloud Photo Library.
Choose how to store the image files on the machine:
- Download Originals to this Mac: The original files are stored locally as well as in the cloud.
- Optimize Mac Storage: The original files are kept in the cloud, and if space permits, originals remain on the Mac. However, most photos stored on the computer are compressed, low-resolution versions.

Photos for iOS

The steps to enable iCloud Photo Library on an iOS device are nearly identical:

Open the Settings app.
Tap the iCloud setting and sign in using your Apple ID and password (the same ones you use on the Mac).
Tap the switch for iCloud Photo Library to turn it on (4.5).

4.5 Enable iCloud Photo Library on an iPhone.
Choose whether originals or optimized versions of photos should be stored on the device (see step 3, above).

Working with Optimized Libraries

Storing optimized versions of photos makes sense on iOS devices, which offer far less storage than most Macs. So why would you choose that option in Photos for OS X? Two reasons: to free up space on your Mac or to take your library along on a laptop such as a MacBook Air, which offers less storage than an iMac or other desktop Mac—as of this writing, the least-expensive MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models include just 128 GB of storage, the same as the top-of-the-line iPad and iPhone.

My MacBook Pro has plenty of space to store my Photos library...well, it would if it weren’t already full of gigabytes of other junk. So even though that machine is my main one, the Photos library is optimized.

Now, I’m not crazy enough to treat iCloud Photo Library as a backup for my originals. True, my originals are stored on Apple’s servers, but that can’t be the only location for those files. So instead, I have a Mac mini in my office that I use for storing media, which includes Photos set up to download originals. That gives me a local backup and an iCloud backup of those important versions, plus additional direct backups to that Mac that I do as part of my regular backup scheme.

Consolidating a Library for iCloud

As I mentioned in Chapter 3, a way to work around a too-small hard disk is to store the photos’ image files on an external disk as referenced files, instead of within the library’s file.

Unfortunately, iCloud Photo Library won’t accommodate that setup. If any photos are referenced, they need to be consolidated back into the main library file (or removed). The easiest way to do that is to create a smart album that finds all referenced files (set the condition to “Photo is referenced” in the pop-up menus), select the photos, and then choose File > Consolidate. Only then will you be able to use the library with iCloud Photo Library.

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