Apple To Discontinue ‘My Photo Stream’ Service In July, Says Users Should Switch To iCloud Photos

Apple has announced that its ‘My Photo Stream’ service will shutdown on July 26, 2023 — and going forward — users are advised to transition to iCloud Photos across all their Apple devices for secure photo storage in iCloud.

Introduced in 2011 alongside iCloud, My Photo Stream offered a free solution to sync up to 1000 photos from the past 30 days across Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

As part of the transition, Apple informs that new photo uploads to My Photo Stream from users’ devices will stop one month prior to the discontinuation date, which comes out to be June 26, 2023.

“Any photos uploaded to the service before that date will remain in iCloud for 30 days from the date of upload and will be available to any of your devices where My Photo Stream is currently enabled. By July 26, 2023, there will be no photos remaining in iCloud, and the service will be shut down,” Apple said.

Users should be aware that photos within My Photo Stream are already stored on “at least one of your devices.” Therefore, if the original photos are present on a device, users won’t lose their photos. However, it is recommended to save any photos not stored in your library (e.g., on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac) to avoid losing them.

In the future, users will need to rely on iCloud Photos for storing and syncing photos across their Apple devices. It’s important to note that once you exceed the 5GB free storage limit — additional storage will require a paid subscription.