Sharing full resolution photos

and you got two - e-mail and Mail Drop

LN

@alexhenry2006 explains this issue in detail perfectly. I also wish full resolution photos were easier to access directly from iCloud Photo Sharing. Even if it there was an option to "save full resolution version to my phone" I'd be psyched. Then my parents could choose what pictures of my children they wanted to save for printing out photos, for example.

Then send feedback to Apple with a feature request to let the developers know. You can use this form: Apple - iCloud - Feedback

Without feedback nothing will change.

Right now, all you have to share full resolution photos is Mail or Maildrop, or third party solutions.

A solution doesn't have to be an Apple method. It can be anything that will do the job intended. Have you considered burning the original files to a DVD and mailing the DVD to the recipient?

Ok, then substitute Flash Drive wherever I mentioned DVD disk.

Seriously?? It's 2015, I don't know anyone who even had a dvd drive on their computer....

I just bought an optical drive today because people insist on sending me DVDs but my new MacBookPro came without an optical drive 😁

Right, I think this is the most appropriate answer. There is no solution to address the OP's question.

From my POV, my concern about printing photos is likely moot since "2048 pixels on the long end" is probably sufficient up to 8"x10" photos, perhaps even larger. I feel like Apple has always been pretty darn good at limiting the scope of their solutions where it makes sense. iCloud Photo Sharing is such a great service IMHO. Such an easy to use, somewhat private (as in not-on-Facebook private, not post-Snowden private) photo stream sharing service that avoids the cumbersome sending of pics via text/email/DVD/flash and avoids MMS messaging costs to recipients. This assumes there's enough of your circle of family & friends that use iOS. Although, the public web site link sharing option appears to use random hashes, so perhaps they're hard enough to guess that you can keep the photos within a reasonable degree of separation. One reason Apple may reduce the image size is b/c they have to think of all of the recipients' devices. It's unclear to me exactly how photos are cycled through for each stream/album on each recipient's device, but I'm guessing storage is a major factor b/c of how many photos can be kept on the device at any one time. If all pics/videos were max resolution, the service might become less practical to the majority of users. It was actually the first question my mom asked me when I told her to set up and accept my shared stream; "This will not take up [all of] my memory, will it?"

I think I have an answer..... I'm no expert, but I am also frustrated that it looks like iCloud is not saving full resolution.

I noticed that if I go to iCloud photos on my PC, then drag-and-drop into a folder on my PC it is a lower quality.

However, if I double click on the photo, then copy-and-paste its a much higher resolution. Granted, I can only copy one photo at a time.

What do you think?

It is utterly embarrassing that Apple's photo sharing solutions are always borked. The original Photo Streams had mysterious photo limits. Now iCloud Photo Sharing reduces resolution, and this is barely explained in Apple's documentation. Even though iCloud itself backs up full-resolution shots and will download optimized versions onto mobile devices, there is actually no practical way of sharing them at full resolution. (More precisely, I can't even share the full-resolution back-end copies. This has nothing to do with local storage constraints.)

How can the richest company in the history of the world be skimping on storage costs like this? Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Facebook, etc., aren't playing these games.

This is unbelievably bone-headed and frustrating. The only possible explanation is some kind of paternalistic arrogance on Apple's part. It simply makes no sense otherwise.

Coming to this question in 2016 after doing quick research that showed 2048 long edge downsampling. I think "Family Sharing" uses the same mechanism and also down-samples.

As was noted in above responses there's no Apple owned way to do full resolution image sharing and distribution. Apple has support for Flickr (soon to die with Yahoo?), I think it can manage full resolution images if you pay but I don't know how Apple handles it.

Apple's iCloud Photo Sharing is cost-free, so it's perhaps not too surprising they limit resolution. It makes it much less useful though.

I have no hope for any future improvements.

léonie:

The file size limit for Mail drop is 5 MB,

Make that 5 GB.

The message, including its attachments, is larger than 5 GB. Try sending the contents of your message in multiple email messages or compressing your attachments to make them as small as possible.

Thanks for catching that typo, OT 😊 😊