Photo Stream is very confusing

Brett1955 wrote:

With the coming end of Photo Stream I’m confused as to what, if anything, I need to do. I have an iMac, iPhone and a couple of iPads. The phone and iPads are all on iCloud Photos, for which I do pay for 50gb of storage. The iMac is not on iCloud Photos. On it I am still using Photo Stream. Many of the photos on my iMac were uploaded direct from a camera. Are all of the photos currently in the Photo stream on my imac safe, or will some be deleted? I did go into the photos app on the imac to see about changing it to icloud also but was told there wouldn’t be enough space in iCloud Photos, and I’m not sure where to exactly find out how much space those photos take up. I should probably mention this is a 2013 iMac running MacOS Catalina.

Information about the My Photo Stream shutdown - Apple Support

You can create multiple Photos libraries. If you hold down the Option key while launching Photos, you will get a dialog like this:

If you wanted to do so, you could keep your current Mac Photos Library local to your Mac, and create a second Photos Library that would synchronize with your other devices through iCloud. To do this, you would:

1. Hold down the Option key while launching Photos, to get the Choose Library dialog.
2. Create a new Photos Library (e.g., "iPhone Photos Library" or "System Photos Library") and choose it as the current one.
3. Go into Photos Preferences (General tab).
4. Click on the "Use as System Photo Library" button to make the new library the System Photo Library. (That's the only one that can synchronize with iCloud Photos.)
5. Select "Importing: [X] Copy items to the Photos library". That has to be turned on to use iCloud Photos. Note that it will affect the behavior of all of your Photos Libraries, not just the current one.
6. Go to Photos Preferences (iCloud).
7. Turn on [X] iCloud Photo Library.
8. Optionally change the (*) Download Originals to this Mac / ( ) Optimize Mac Storage selection.

I believe that if you have iCloud Photo Library and My Photo Stream turned on at the same time, there might be an interaction between the two. The Help talks about there being no My Photo Stream album, and about all of the My Photo Stream albums being added to the All Photos album.

To play it safe, you might want to copy all of your My Photo Stream photos to Finder folders, and then turn off My Photo Stream, and only then enable iCloud Photos on the Mac.

I don't use Photo Stream, but I would suggest

1. Creating a folder on one of your Mac's drives.
2. Going into the My Photo Stream album in the Mac Photos app.
3. Selecting all of the photos in that album, then dragging and dropping them to the folder you created in step #1 (which is outside of iCloud, outside of Photo Stream, outside of your Photos Library).

Once you have your photos safe (on that drive and its backups), you can take your time about deciding which (if any) to import into Photos (or other programs such as Lightroom Classic).

On a Mac My Photo Stream is automatically importing all photos from My Photo Stream into the Photos Library, provided your Mac has been running and connected to the internet while the photos have been in My Photo Stream.

The big problem with My Photo has been, that it is buffer that will be holding the new photos only for a short time in icloud, only for at most thirty days and no more than 1000 photos at once. The mac has to be online during this short window of opportunity and grabbing the new photos.

Previously added photos will automatically be purged when the time is up and replaced by the more recent photos.

I'm just waiting and seeing. All my data is fully backed up so I'll lose nothing. What happens is what happens, just be sure you have backups in any case.