HT202786: iCloud Photo Sharing

Learn about iCloud Photo Sharing
alexhenry2006

Q: Sharing full resolution photos

I share a lot of photos with my girlfriend, friends and family. I use to use shared photo streams until I realized that photos were re-scaled to a lower resolution. I have then used a mix of dropbox, google drive and air drop to share pictures as I cannot compromise on quality. However, when iCloud Drive and then Photos and iCloud Photo Sharing were released, I thought I would finally be able to go back to an Apple solution. However, I have just realized to my complete disbelief that iCloud Photo Sharing also re-scale photos to a lower resolution (max 2048 pixels on the long end). While I understand the limitation for people getting the service for free, I am a paying iCloud Drive customers and I cannot for the life of me understand why Apple, especially with its focus on retina display, doesn't offer a way to share full resolution pictures (which would likely use my iCloud Drive storage). I know I am not the only one bothered by this so does anyone has any idea how to fix this other than going back to using (better) cloud service like Dropbox or GDrive?

iPhoto '11, OS X Mavericks (10.9.3)

Posted on May 13, 2015 12:20 PM

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Q: Sharing full resolution photos

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  • by KeepThemSeparate,

    KeepThemSeparate KeepThemSeparate Sep 10, 2015 12:51 PM in response to alexhenry2006
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 10, 2015 12:51 PM in response to alexhenry2006

    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?

  • by muffinsniffum,

    muffinsniffum muffinsniffum Sep 26, 2015 2:52 PM in response to alexhenry2006
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Sep 26, 2015 2:52 PM in response to alexhenry2006

    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.

  • by jfaughnan,

    jfaughnan jfaughnan May 11, 2016 12:10 PM in response to alexhenry2006
    Level 3 (803 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 11, 2016 12:10 PM in response to alexhenry2006

    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.

  • by Old Toad,

    Old Toad Old Toad May 11, 2016 1:31 PM in response to léonie
    Level 10 (140,898 points)
    Photos for Mac
    May 11, 2016 1:31 PM in response to léonie

    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.

    OTsig.png

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie May 11, 2016 1:38 PM in response to Old Toad
    Level 10 (105,568 points)
    iLife
    May 11, 2016 1:38 PM in response to Old Toad

    Thanks for catching that typo, OT

  • by Old Toad,

    Old Toad Old Toad May 11, 2016 1:42 PM in response to léonie
    Level 10 (140,898 points)
    Photos for Mac
    May 11, 2016 1:42 PM in response to léonie

    Thumbsup.png

  • by averynkh,

    averynkh averynkh Jun 10, 2016 8:42 AM in response to alexhenry2006
    Level 1 (9 points)
    iCloud
    Jun 10, 2016 8:42 AM in response to alexhenry2006

    i just noticed this too!!!!

    i am really ****** of Apple sometimes, at least let us to choose to keep them full resolution or downscale right???

    nowadays everyone has wifi at home, why cant we keep the original full resolution!!!!!!!

    i thought photos inside iCloud Photo Sharing are full resolution until just now..

    indeed what the fxxx is apple doing!!

  • by Terence Devlin,

    Terence Devlin Terence Devlin Jun 10, 2016 8:49 AM in response to averynkh
    Level 10 (139,475 points)
    iLife
    Jun 10, 2016 8:49 AM in response to averynkh

    Photos - like iPhoto and Aperture - does preserve your original.

     

    I've no idea how you know the set up in everybody's homes.

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