How to Upload New iPhone Photos to iCloud Automatically

Co-authored by wikiHow Staff

Last Updated: September 6, 2019

This wikiHow will teach you how to automatically upload new photos taken on your iPhone to your iCloud account, either by enabling the iCloud Photo Library or the Photo Stream.

Steps

1
Open the iPhone's Settings. This is the grey icon with cogs located on one of the home screens.
- It may also be located in the “Utilities” folder on a home screen.
2
Scroll down and tap iCloud. This is in the fourth set of options.
3
Sign in to your iCloud account (if necessary).
- Enter your Apple ID and password.
- Tap Sign in.
4
Tap Photos.
5
Slide the iCloud Photo Library button to the On position. This will automatically upload your entire Photos library (including video) when your device syncs to iCloud.
- You can choose between Optimize Storage or Download and Keep Originals. The former will prioritize iCloud over local storage to save space, the latter will keep the original copy on the phone.
- iCloud Photo Library uses iCloud storage space. You can store any number of photos as long as you have the available space.
- Your photo library can now be accessed from the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. You can also access your photo library from a web browser by going to the Photos section of www.icloud.com.^{[1]
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6
Slide the My Photo Stream button to the On position. Doing this will automatically upload your recent photos to all of your devices using iCloud when you're connected to WiFi.
- My Photo Stream does NOT use up iCloud storage space.
- You can only store up to 1000 of the most recent photos with Photo Stream. Photos beyond 1000 will be removed from the photo stream.^{[2]
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- My Photo stream does not support video.
- My Photo stream may degrade the quality of your photos to conserve bandwidth.