Is Photostream finally dead?

I’ve never used iCloud Photos because the older “Photostream” feature more than served my needs. I know that quite a while ago Apple warned that Photostream was being deprecated. And now it seems like it has been (silently?) removed. As suddenly, I can no longer see the “My Photostream” album on any of my devices.

(Not many people may notice this, as Photostream is automatically turned off when you enable iCloud Photos. But let’s “pour one out” for a very handy, simple feature.)

hmm, didn’t know about the deprecation, so thanks for that, but as of right this second, “My Photo Stream” still exists on my various devices…

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I got this warning today that Photo Stream would be gone July 26th and any Photo Stream photos would only be kept in Photos for 30 days.

My Photo Stream will be shut down on July 26
Dear William Acree,
My Photo Stream is scheduled to be shut down on July 26, 2023.
As part of this transition, new photo uploads to My Photo Stream from your devices will be stopped on June 26. Any photos uploaded to the service before that date will remain in iCloud for 30 days from the date of upload and will be available to any of your devices where My Photo Stream is currently enabled. By July 26, there will be no photos remaining in iCloud, and the service will be shut down.
The photos in My Photo Stream are already stored on at least one of your devices, so as long as you have the device with your originals, you won’t lose any photos as part of this process. If a photo you want is not already in your library on a particular iPhone, iPad, or Mac, make sure you save it to your library on that device. For more information on this transition and instructions on how to download photos from My Photo Stream, read Information about the My Photo Stream shutdown.
Moving forward, iCloud Photos is the best way to keep the photos and videos you take up to date across all your devices and safely stored in iCloud. iCloud Photos can be enabled on iOS 8.3 or later, iPadOS 8.3 or later, and macOS 10 Yosemite or later. Once set up, you can view your photos and videos in the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Watch, iCloud.com, and even sync them to a Windows PC using iCloud for Windows.
For more information about My Photo Stream visit this support article.
Apple Support

I used to use it a lot. Really liked it, then it became less reliable for me. Nowadays I take far fewer pics and so AirDrop does it for me.

Lots of places claim iCloud Photos is a good replacement but of course they fail to mention that PhotoStream was free, iCloud Photos is not and is just another nice little “service” cash maker for Apple, because raking in $3k for a notebook or $1k for a phone just wasn’t quite enough to satisfy their greed entrepreneurial founder spirit.

Of course iCloud Photos is actually free and good enough if your library is comprised of about 800 photos (or whatever amounts to the free 5 GB, assuming you use it for nothing else - so no backups!). So they definitely have that going for them. I’m sure others will be able to even better point out how this is all in everybody’s best interest and Apple is actually bending over backwards to save humanity with this move. Also, Google and Samsung evil so this is awesome. Thank you, Tim. Much obliged.

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Coincidentally I gave in about a month ago and bought a little more fully into iCloud. I didn’t do it in particular for photos, though I have large libraries across several devices. I’ve always been a little wary of Photo Stream because it offers a chance to capture photos to my canonical machine, but they roll off eventually and it’s another work routine to download them periodically.

But everything that @Simon said above.

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Photostream did always have the drawback that live photos and videos were never included.

I used it a long time ago for a while. There are many ways to get photos off your iPhone if you really want to do it.

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Yes. If I need a photo from my iPhone on my desktop right away, Photostream is beyond useless, including the extra trip I’d need to take into Photos to retrieve something I could drop directly into another app.

Right now, by far my favorite way of dealing with this is Air Drop. It is close to seamless, and I have the photo right where I want it within 10 seconds of deciding I want to do that.