The power and capabilities of my iPhone never cease to amaze me and every time I turn around I’m learning something new. Last weekend while in North Carolina for the wedding I was introduced to a cool little trick on my iPhone that is a serious game changer.
It’s no secret I love taking pictures – I’m a self admitted picture hoarder. When I’m in a group of people and we gather to take a picture you better believe I’m one of those people that throws my phone at the waiter to “take one with my camera too.” I have this fear that if I don’t get it on my camera, I will never see that picture. Everyone has good intentions to email it over later, but they never do and I feel better knowing I have it in my possession.
Last weekend we were with all of Steve’s siblings and many in-laws and we were all taking pictures left and right. Steve’s sister set up a photo stream and invited us all to participate. Everyone selected photos from the weekend and added it to the stream for everyone to access. You can imagine my heart singing sweet songs knowing I had all the photos – which meant on the last night when we were at the most delicious ice cream place and we all gathered for a photo around the owner of the shop, we took only one photo and although it wasn’t with my camera, I knew it would be safely in my possession.
It’s a super easy process and you can create streams for a number reasons. Vacation with friends – create a stream. T-ball season for your son – create a stream. Cousins scattered across the country – create a stream. I can already tell this is going to be a game changer for me! Not to mention this doesn’t use your storage space!!
Here’s how you do it:
Open up the photos app on your iPhone or iPad (you do need to be updated to OS7 and have photos turned on in your iCloud in your general settings)
At the bottom of the screen select the cloud icon:
Create a name for your stream:
Invite members to join your stream (everyone you invite will get an email or text asking them to accept or decline the invitation to the stream):
Once your stream is created you can add photos. Select a photo you’d like to add and touch the icon in the bottom left hand corner.
Your camera roll will pop and you’ll be able to select all the pictures you’d like to add to the stream by checking the blue checkmark in the bottom right corner of each picture.
Choose to send your pictures to the iCloud icon
It will have you select which stream to send the picture to and you can add comments to the pictures if you’d like.
And just like that all your selected pictures are in the stream as well as everyone else’s pictures that they’ve sent to the stream.
If you need to add more people later – no big deal. Open the stream and in the bottom right select “People”
You’ll be able to see everyone that is currently participating in the stream and add new people.
Go start streaming!
