How To Use Photo Stream On Your Desktop

One of the features of iOS 5 I was really looking forward to was Photo Stream.  For years, I've been manually transferring photos from my phone to my computer.  Occasionally I'd e-mail them to myself.  Maybe even use Dropbox.  But, all of those methods feel like there is one or more extra steps to get it done.  Also, you don't want your picture to degrade in quality.

That's where Photo Stream comes in.

You take a picture on your iPhone 4 and it automatically goes to your iPad, iPod Touch (with internet connection), Apple TV and desktop computer.  If you have pictures taken with a camera, you can download them to your iPad or desktop computer and it can be uploaded to your Photo Stream that will be viewable on all of your iDevices.  Imagine how much easier it would be to organize all of your vacation pictures!

It's easy enough to configure the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Apple TV to use Photo Stream.  For the most part, it involves going to Settings, going to the iCloud section and turning on Photo Stream.  But, there are no apparent instructions to see your Photo Stream on your desktop.  It's not at iCloud.com.  Here's how to do it:


GottaBeMobile did most of the work for me.  There is information on the website on how to set up Photo Stream on your Windows PC or your Mac.  Here are the links:

• How To Get iCloud's Photo Stream Working On A Windows PC
• iOS 5: How To Setup iCloud's Photo Stream On Mac

I have a Windows PC and it worked like a charm.  I even copied a link of my Photo Stream folder to my desktop so I can get to it easily.  It IS like magic!

One thing about Photo Stream on a Mac, you need the latest OS X Lion.  That'll cost you $30 but so far I really love the iCloud features, especially Photo Stream.