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Apple to Upgrade iCloud with Photo Sharing, Notes and Reminders on iCloud.com

Monday May 14, 2012 10:12 am PDT by Eric Slivka

The Wall Street Journal briefly reports that Apple is planning to unveil an upgrade to iCloud at next month's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), with one of the main new features being a photo-sharing functionality.

The new features, expected to be announced at Apple's world-wide developer conference beginning June 11, will allow iCloud users to share sets of photos with other iCloud users and to comment on them, these people said. Currently, users can only store one set of photos in iCloud through a feature called Photo Stream, which is designed to sync those photos to other Apple devices, not share them.

Apple also appears to be looking to extend the Photo Stream feature to videos, allowing users to access their personal videos through iCloud. Finally, the report confirms that the Notes and Reminders icons spotted on a beta.icloud.com site late last week will be associated with new functionality to sync those services via iCloud for access through both dedicated apps and the iCloud website.

All of the new iCloud features are expected to make their way into iOS 6, which is also expected to be previewed at WWDC.

Top Rated Comments

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basesloaded190

25 months ago

This is good and all, but I am way more interested to see what iOS 6 will bring us.

Rating: 23 Positives

jasonxneo

25 months ago

Great news! New improvements to icloud are always welcomed :)

Rating: 16 Positives

FSMBP

25 months ago

Definitely a step in the right direction. I would like to share photos to non-iCloud users though (like MobileMe had it before). It would be nice to give someone a link to view your albums like Flickr.

I currently use Flickr but consolidation of services is key.

Rating: 8 Positives

Stridder44

25 months ago

Add in "comments" and "likes" and an individual iCloud user wall and you have a watered-down version of Facebook (only it's run by Apple). I honestly wouldn't mind something like that.

Rating: 8 Positives

Peace

25 months ago

Wouldn't it be nice if you could share playlist's ?

Rating: 8 Positives

gregwyattjr

25 months ago

I'm just glad that iCloud is already working so much better than MobileMe. Hopefully they'll keep it up!

Rating: 7 Positives

HelveticaNeue

25 months ago

The elephant in the corner of the room is the lack of Pages/Keynote/Numbers functionality on Mac OS X. Until they really address that issue I think the 'new features' are really distractions from the holes that exist between their client (Mac OS X) and iCloud service.

Obviously, this is coming in Mountain Lion, so I don't think this Elephant is in the corner anymore. More like it's trudging out the door.

Rating: 6 Positives

bushido

25 months ago

there is a god, finally photo sharing. photo stream is useless to me as i take many screen shots and temporarily store a lot which i dont need on all of my devices

Rating: 5 Positives

ipedro

25 months ago

Facebook bought Instagram for $1B for a reason: It's because Instagram would have had the potential to kill Facebook had another large backer picked them up (i.e.Google).

Facebook was built on status updates. Twitter does this better but came in late to the party and is still building its user base. Instagram does status updates better than both.

Facebook and Twitter say: "Read what I'm doing. I have to come up with an interesting way in writing to say it though."

Instagram says: "Look at what I'm doing. Instagram makes all my photos look great too!"

If Apple releases a built in photo feed that you can share with other iOS/iCloud users, they will have become a major threat to Facebook and Instagram.

1 - Take a photo with the built in camera app
2 - Share it to your public photo stream in iCloud with a single button or switch.
3 - Others can follow your photo activity, comment and like.

Apple can choose to build in some iPhoto like filters and that's it, it makes Instagram instantly redundant and flushes $1B of Facebook's dollars down the toilet. Apple also positions itself to beat Facebook as a social media service with a very simple front end that's built right into all of its iOS devices (and Mac's with Mountain Lion).

Rating: 5 Positives

Small White Car

25 months ago

Sounds like they want to take Photo Journals and make them even more Facebook-ish.

Ugh.

Just give us back what MobileMe Galleries did. They were great and no one else offers a product quite as easy to use.

Rating: 4 Positives

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