Apple to shut down the My Photo Stream service on July 26—here’s what to do

Apple will shut down My Photo Stream in July 2023, with new uploads no longer accepted. Learn what to do and how to save your originals to keep them.

Apple Photos and iCloud icons
  • Media uploaded to My Photo Stream before May 26 will be available for 30 days.
  • New uploads are no longer permitted as of May 26, 2023.
  • By July 26, 2023, your My Photo Stream will be deleted.

My Photo Stream shutting down on May 26, 2023

My Photo Stream is a free service that launched in the early days of iCloud, designed to store the most recent 1,000 images in iCloud for 30 days.

Apple announced that My Photo Stream will shut down on May 26, 2023, in favor of iCloud Photos as the preferred way to keep your images and videos in sync.

“The photos in My Photo Stream are already stored on at least one of your devices,” reads Apple’s support document, adding, “As long as you have the device with your originals, you won’t lose any photos as part of this process.”

You’ll want to save images in My Photo Stream to the Photos library on any devices that don’t have the originals. Or better yet, turn on iCloud Photos to synchronize your photos and videos across all your devices.

How to save images in My Photo Stream

Select one or more images in the My Photo Stream album in the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad or Mac, then use the Share menu to save them to your library.

  1. Open the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.
  2. Hit the Albums tab, open the My Photo Stream album and touch the Select button (iPhone/iPad), or open the My Photo Stream album (Mac).
  3. Touch the images you want to keep, then hit the Share button and choose Save Image (iPhone/iPad) or Command-click images and videos in My Photo Stream album and simply drag them to your library (Mac) to keep them.

To use iCloud Photos, turn on Photos in the iCloud settings on your iPhone, iPad and Mac, then follow the instructions. Following initial sync, which may take hours or days depending on the size of your library, you’ll be able to access your photos and videos across your iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.

Also, you can access iCloud Photos on any computer through a web browser and synchronize them to a Windows PC using iCloud for Windows.