The full-featured iCloud Photo Library arrived three years later when Apple released iOS 8.1 in early 2014 - and it was a total game-changer. The Photo Stream originals were stored only in iCloud, waiting to be transferred to your Mac or PC, although they also remained in your local photo library (your “Camera Roll”) unless you manually deleted them. The iPhone and iPad each kept a separate Photo Stream album so you could easily see the photos you captured on other devices, but to make things even weirder, as I noted in 2012, iOS stored a downscaled version of your photo in that section, optimized for the resolution of the specific iPhone or iPad it was on. Granted, cellular data was expensive in those days, but Apple wasn’t willing to even give folks the option to have their photos safely backed up while on the go.

Plus, iCloud Photo Stream only transferred photos over a Wi-Fi connection. You still had to plug your iPhone into your Mac to transfer those the old-fashioned way or find another cloud service, such as Dropbox, that would handle this for you. However, there was one other catch: iCloud Photo Stream didn’t support videos at all.

Stream social gloves free