Apple's cloud based Photo Stream is a photo sharing service that allows you to easily share your photos between devices and among other users. These photos can be viewed from any Apple device, including iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Mac, and Apple TV along with Windows-based PCs. The feature was introduced with iOS 5.0 and has been evolving since. While Photo Stream acts a very good and useful features for the times when you have to share a complete album of an event or several photos of your vacation with your family members, it eats storage space.
When you turn the Photo Stream on - by default - it automatically shares your latest photos between any of your Apple devices that too have Photo Stream turned on. This essentially means that you do not have to constantly update your iPad with the pics you took from iPhone.
A significant amount of storage is wasted for redundantly storing these hundreds of photos on the Photo Stream. Since it duplicates your last 1000 photos and copies them from the Camera Roll in to a new Photo Stream folder. Although, it might be a very useful feature for many, especially those who have connected their Macs since Macs have better storage than smaller devices, some users should consider turning it off. If you are not constantly in need of sharing albums with your friends, or do not need the feature of having a shared album on all your Apple devices, you can easily turn this feature off. To those, who have 8 or 16 GB devices, this feature can cause some big storage shortage issue in a while.
How to turn off photo stream:
- Go to Settings and then Photos and Camera.
- Disable the option My Photo Stream by slider and confirm that you want to clear your Photo Stream.
Remember that the memory occupied by the Photo Stream varies from each of the iOS devices. Hence you do not need to worry about the storage space if you have a Mac or a device with better storage capacity attached to Photo Stream.
