Comparison between My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Library

What is My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Library?

Well, My Photo Stream can help us upload new photos to our iCloud automatically and send them to other iOS devices when they’re connected with Wifi; while iCloud Photo Library help us upload and store whole library in iCloud, and allows us to access photos and videos from all devices.

Both of them can help us get photos from our iOS devices, but they are not same thing. What’s the comparison between My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Library?

Enable My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Library

Firstly we’ll see how to enable them, then we can use it and see the difference between them.

For iCloud Photo Library:

1.Open your iPhone, go to Setting--iCloud--Photos, then find and turn on “iCloud Photo Library.

2. Or you can go to Setting--Photo&Camera, then turn on “iCloud Photo Library”.

For My Photo Stream:

1.Go to Setting--iCloud--Photo, find and turn on “My Photo Stream”.

2.Or you can go to Setting--Photo&Camera, and turn on “My Photo Stream”.



The Format of Photos They Support

Also there is some difference of the format they support, see below detailed information.

For iCloud Photo Library:

It can upload photos and videos with original format JPEG, RAW, PNG, GIF, and MP4.

For My Photo Stream:

It can upload photos with format JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and most of them are RAM format, but it doesn’t support us to upload videos.

The Difference of Viewing Photos

Now we’ll see how to view photos from them and what’s the difference between them.

For iCloud Photo Library:

Firstly, we’ll need to make sure that we have enabled our iCloud Photo Library.

Then go to Photo--Album--All Photos.

And you can also view them from iCloud.com.

For My Photo Stream:

When you turn on My Photo Stream, you can go to Photo--Album--My Photo Stream, and you can see your photos there, but not videos.

And besides those differences, we should notice that iCloud Photo Library will take the storage space of our iCloud, while My Photo Stream doesn’t; and when using iCloud Photo LIbrary, we couldn’t upload photos and videos on iTunes, but when we use My Photo Stream, this won’t happen.

Remark: when you lost or deleted some of your photos on iPhone iPad, or you want to extract them selectively from your iTunes and iCloud backup, you can come to iRefone for help.

For detailed steps, you can refer to below article for checking:

Sync Notes from iCloud Backup Directly and Selectively