Apple will discontinue the free cloud storage service My Photo Stream from July 26

Apple will discontinue the free My Photo Stream service on July 26. This allows users to upload the thousand most recent photos to the cloud, where they are stored for thirty days. From now on, users can only use iCloud photos.

A month earlier, on June 26, it will no longer be possible to upload new photos to the service. The photos will then be stored in the iCloud for another thirty days, as before, before they are deleted. Therefore, if the photos are not saved locally at that point, they will be lost. Apple guesses encourages users to switch to iCloud Photos for storing photos in the cloud.

My Photo Stream is very similar to iCloud Photos, but unlike the latter, it is intended more as a temporary solution. The photos sent to iCloud this way do not count towards iCloud storage. So even if users reach their storage limit, they can still save photos to the cloud and find them on other Apple devices.

However, this only applies to the thousand most recent photos and they are only kept for a maximum of thirty days. The resolution is also lower and fewer file types are supported than iCloud Photos. The latter is also the only one of the two services that supports videos. My Photo Stream was released at the same time as the iCloud service in 2011.