Apple's iCloud.com Photos app was quietly updated over the weekend, adding a new zoom option to the toolbar that lets users zoom in on photos that have been uploaded to iCloud Photo Library.
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As noted by German site iFun.de, Apple's web-based Photos app has also gained a new feature that allows users to send photos via email directly from the website, making sharing photos easier than ever before.
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The addition of new zoom and email features follows a major November update to the iCloud.com Photos app, which began allowing users to upload photos to iCloud for the first time. Before the addition of the uploading tool, the standard iCloud.com site only allowed users to view, download, and delete iCloud Photo Library images.
With the uploading tool and new sharing features, iCloud is slowly becoming a viable and useful storage option for users who wish to upload and manage entire photo libraries. Still in beta, iCloud Photo Library was initially introduced alongside iOS 8.1, letting users sync and access all of their photos on all of their iOS devices and Macs via the web.
Apple is working on a Photos app for the Mac, which will work alongside both the Photos app on iOS and the iCloud.com Photos app on the web. Photos, which will replace both Apple's iPhoto app and Aperture, is supposed to be launching in the early months of 2015. There's been little word on its development since its initial June introduction, however.
Top Rated Comments
Apple needs to add more free storage. I have two devices and a MBP. 5 GB isn't nearly enough to back up an iPhone and iPad, store photos, emails, and documents.
I know it sounds stupid to shout, "MORE FREE STUFF," but cloud storage is too ubiquitous now to start charging for what competitors offer for free.
Can't we have 5 GB per device or something? We are paying a premium for the hardware.
- take 73 days to upload all your photos
- uploading will halt for several days without any explanation, slowly driving you insane.
- the photo collection on your iPhone will be synced as well and will obviously continue to sync while you're away from your wifi network with no option to pause the process. Expect a huge bill from your phone operator.
- 94 photos will refuse to sync without any clue why or how to fix it.
- one day, all your photos will be missing only to magically return the next day. The heart attack is a bonus.
- you can upload jpg and png files, but only photos taken with the iPhoto camera are 100% compatible. Other images sometimes refuse to sync. No explanation is given, they just don't show up in iCloud. You ask yourself why.
- for 15% of your photos, no thumbnail will be generated. Your beautiful photo collection looks horrible. For days you try to make iCloud generate the missing thumbnails.
- when editing some photos, the changes will not propagate to other devices and their status will indefinitely be set to "Waiting..." The only solution is to remove and re-add those photos, but they will no longer be chronologically ordered as a result.
- some iCloud photos will show up on your iPhone but will be missing on your iPad. You don't know why and it's bugging you.
- if you want to make space, you'll have to select each photo you want to delete one by one. Then, they will moved to a "recently deleted" folder where you have to delete them again. Your deleted photos will also remain in your Photos Stream, Camera Roll and Shared Streams where you also have to delete them to make space.
After many frustrations and wasted days, you dump all your photos in Dropbox. Done.