iCloud Photo Library (beta) - how does it work?

I have almost the same question too.i enabled icloud photo library and my pics uploaded to icloud.com.then disabled it and activate photo stream.so far no problem.BUT in my photo stream now i have photos from my mac and on my local storage of my ipad at settings appears to be occupied not only by my ipad photos but from the photos i uploaded from my mac.shouldnt be occupied the ipad's local storage occupied ONLY from my ipad's photos?

The purpose of iCloud Photo Library is similar to iTunes Match; have all your photos on all your Apple devices, while it seamlessly keeps itself updated automatically.

If I choose the option to Optimize the storage, photos that was taken from that device remains at full resolution, while photos taken from other devices will get downloaded at lower resolution optimized for viewing purpose only. Any editing I do will cause the full resolution to get downloaded, and any changes gets replicated to other devices.

I think the local full resolution copy will only get removed in favor of Optimized version if the iOS device is low on storage. There's no mention of this, but that's how it's been with iTunes Match and iCloud Photos. I just wish there's a button for this.

I'm a Windows user and only have an iPad. I use the iCloud web Photos app to upload photos taken using my Olympus camera. This way, I can bring the whole collection with me without eating up too much of my iPad's storage.

For photos taken using my iPad, what I do is download all the photos using Dropbox, delete the local copy on my iPad, then re-upload only those that I like through the web app. Tedious but for now it serves the purpose.

The only problem I have now is any photos added will get downloaded again in Dropbox, requiring me to manually cleanup the duplicates. Hope this goes out of beta soon and Dropbox updated to fully support it.

Hey ALL,

Like everyone else who have posted and those who have not; after spending countless nights and weekends trying to solve the very issue about how to get all your photos up to iCloud photo and without loosing the way you have them organized.

And then one morning I remembered how Google Picasa worked for Web Albums..and so i did the following:

• Fired up Aperture and exported my entire 56K photo library
• Made the Folder name using the EVENT, Album, etc. Depending how you have your photos you may need to do several exports to get everything unloaded with a folder name that represents the photos that are inside.
• Then download the latest version of Picasa (if you have the old version uninstall it the new version supports 64bit).
• Set all your Picasa preferences, the main one is to turn off the automatic upload option of your cameral roll, of if you have any people in your circle, they login and find all your photos being shared with them :-)
• Now point Picasa to your folder structure where your photos reside and let it crank away. It will import them and keep them organized by the folder name. and it will also start face recognizing... in fact the face recognizing is 100 times faster and learns very quickly. I am still training iPhoto and Aperture after 2 years... and it seems to get people in the wrong folder when my devices sync (and yes I have cleared that iPod cache so many times; even rebuilt, repaired the library and attempted to manually create everything over... just gave up)..
• Now after your photos have imported o Picasa has finished optimizing and indexing things. While that is being done you can either do some of the face recognizing tagging and confirming, and or change the settings on a few albums to sync to the Web. Set the feature to only be visible to you, this way you can tinker around with things and not have your friends or anyone you connect with sending you messages about something you just uploaded.
• I recommend having at LEAST one album sync with Google cloud.

Head over to the iTunes App store and purchase the following two apps. (I am not connected or trying to push anyone these two apps, I simply tried and few and liked these for my purposes and because I could edit photos directly on my iPhone with the photo on the cloud. When you want to edit a photo it downloads to your device, and then when you are done it puts it back into the cloud.

1. Web Albums

2. Best Album

Add your google account.. and let it begin to sync. You will see your photo albums you just synced thru Picasa. Make a change to a photo in Picasa and watch it appear immediately to your phone, iPad or any device running either of these two apps.

Go ahead and make a change to a photo and save it... check picasa on your desktop and you will see the changes are there.

You will now setup the same thing Apple is gonna bring us at sometime... the difference is google brought it to everyone back when Picasa was updated to sync with a cloud...and since Picasa has been around for at least 10 years many things we are waiting for with Apple we done by the fresh young programmers at Google, in fact before it went public when they had the freedom to create anything they felt like doing. Now they answer to the board of directors and much of that creativity was lost.

Apple should track down the folks who created these apps and hire them...

I hate the fact I had to use GOOGLE for something but as much as it hurts me to say it.... Google has figured out photo management on both a desktop and with a cloud. And there seems to be quite a few applications all over that work with the google cloud, so you have many options to choose from. So as we keep score between Apple, Samsung and Google. I have to say the win on this issue goes to Google.

Peace...

I'm having trouble with my photos being restored and it's all surrounded with Itunes, syncing, backing up and restoring. Can someone please help me, I don't want to lose all the pictures I took !

I use a PC. Can I confirm with anyone a couple of things?

iCloud Photo Library (IPL) turned on now excludes me from using iTunes for putting photos and videos on my iPad?

iCloud.com will currently only upload photos from my PC (ie not video)?

There is no planned release for a Photos app for PC?

So I have no way of putting a movie on my iPad with IPL turned on?

Would appreciate if someone could tell me that I have got this wrong (I hope so).

Thanks

I recently spend a lot of time and effort moving our family of 4 to a Family Sharing program. It works nicely for music and apps.

Now that there is this new option for iPhoto I am seriously considering using it to store all our photos (right now we are using a local NAS). Problem is, it appears, is that everyone now has their own account and therefore cannot point iPhoto to the same account for iPhoto.

I suppose to reasoning for this would be that if I'm going to spend $20/Month to get 1TB of storage, I'm not going to be doing it for every account - just the one main family account.

Thoughts?