Tuesday, April 16th, 2013

Help! My images disappeared from my iPad and iPhone

Understand the limits of the Photo Stream and how to save images from it so they aren’t removed from your iPad or iPhone

Sometimes you may know that you had some images on your iPad or iPhone but suddenly you find that they’ve gone.

This happens to me when I drop some images into my Photo Stream on my Windows PC that I want to use on my iPad. I drop images into the Uploads folder on my PC and, via the iCloud, they are synced automatically to my iPad. I know the images got there safely – I put them there months ago and I know that I saw them on my iPad but suddenly today they aren’t there. Confusing? Happened to you? It probably has and here is the explanation as to why they disappear and how to stop them from doing so.

The issue is the Photo Stream. The photo stream on the iPad and iPhone only store the last one thousand images – if you shoot lots of images and, say have your iPhone and iPad synced then you’ll run out of space pretty quickly. When you do then images are knocked out of the Photo Stream to make room for more recent ones.

The issue doesn’t happen on your Mac or PC because they have plenty of space so photos in your Photo Stream folders there are always there – it is just a protection against junking up your iPhone or iPad with ‘stuff’.

So, what do you do when you want to keep some of the images from your Photo Stream permanently and you don’t want to lose them? The answer is to move them to an album or to your Camera Roll. The images in your camera roll and in albums are there to stay. And just to clarify, you don’t have to move images from the Photo stream that you captured with that device – because images you capture on the iPad for example are in the Camera Roll and stay there. The images you want to save are those that get synced to the iPad via iCloud from other devices such as your iPhone or PC or Mac – they are the ones that only hang around for a short time.

How to move images from your Photo Stream to an album

So, to move a lot of images to an album (an easy solution for lots of images that you want to save to somewhere that isolates them from all your other images), tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream.

You should now see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Then tap Edit.

In this mode you can now tap the images that you want to save – each of them should have a blue checkmark on them. Now tap Save and choose to Save to an Existing Album or Save to New Album.

I have an album for images I want to edit and play with on the iPad called Editable Pix so I typically tap that to select it. This lets me store those images so they are isolated from all the other images in my Camera Roll.

How to move images from your Photo Stream to your Camera Roll

It is also possible to save photos from the Photo Stream to the Camera Roll. The advantage of this is that they are in the Camera Roll itself and in some situations that might work best for you.

To do this, again tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream so you see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Again tap Edit. In this mode you can now tap the images that you want to save – each of them should have a blue checkmark on them. Now, tap the Share button in the top left of the screen:

And choose Save to Camera Roll. (It is very confusing that these two processes that really are so similar are handled so differently in iOS6).

How to save one image from your Photo Stream to your Camera Roll

Now, if you just want to save one image from the Photo Stream to the Camera Roll, tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream so you see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Tap the one image that you want to copy to the Camera Roll so it is showing full screen. Now tap the Send to button that is a box with an arrow coming out of it in the top right of the screen and choose Save to Camera Roll from the menu.

Now you will never again lose images off your iPhone or iPad that you really want to keep.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:iPad, Mac, photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:00 am1 Comment links to this post

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

Sync photos from iPad or iPhone to your Mac

Learn how to download photos from your iPad or iPhone to your Mac


I’ve been using iCloud on the PC for a while now to sync photos from my iPad to my PC and it works well. On my new Mac, however, I had a problem, you see the feature is built in so you don’t have to install it – but you do have to find it! Here’s how:

1. Assuming you already have an iPad or iPhone and you have been taking photos with it, then you want to get them to your Mac. Start on your iPad and make sure it is set to sync. Do this in Settings – scroll to find Photos & Camera and make sure that My Photo Stream is turned on. This means that when you are on a wifi connection your photo stream will be synced with iCloud.

Note:
The photo stream has some limits. One is that iCloud itself only stores images for 30 days so after that they disappear. However provided you are connected via wifi on a regular basis these will be synced frequently so that won’t be a big issue.

On a device like the iPad and iPhone the photo stream will only contain those most recent 1,000 images – older ones are removed. This is because you have less space on your iPad and iPhone than on a Mac or PC. Remember too that the photo stream contains images from the iPad/iPhone and from your Mac or PC so this 1,000 image limitation is for images from all devices in total, so it’s not as big as it might seem.

On the PC that is less of a problem because you have a special Photo stream folder that you put images into to sync them, so you know how many you are putting there. It is more of an issue on the Mac because the process is more automated so you have to be mindful of what is happening. On your Mac or PC all the images from your Photo stream are stored – because there is more storage available on them.

2. To set up the Mac. You need to click iPhoto to launch it and then click Web: Photo Stream and turn this on.

3. Now, if you are connected via wifi you can wait as your photo stream downloads automatically for you otherwise this will happen automatically next time you are connected.

Once images are downloaded to iPhoto they will be added to the Photos folder so even if you turn off Photo Stream at some time the images that are already downloaded will have be stored there permanently.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:iPad, Mac, photography

posted by Helen Bradley @ 5:38 amNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

How to set up your PC and your iPad for the free iWork and iCloud

If you have an iPad and if you have upgraded to the new iOS 5 then you can take advantage of the free iCloud and iWork tools for synching files and storing them in the Cloud. iCloud allows you to synch not only photos but also data such as files across your devices. So you can use this new technology to share Microsoft Office documents with Numbers, Keynote and Pages on your iPad. And you do this on your PC using a browser and by passing iTunes – something I for one am really glad about.

So, if you’re using a Windows PC, you can automatically access documents that have been sent from the iPad to the iCloud without needing to plug your iPad into your computer or use iTunes. It is a long over due technology and it provides a more professional approach to the task of file exchange – not to mention it will solve the problem that some users experience where their network administrators block iTunes.

Getting this all configured is simple but it is far from intuitive. Nowhere could I find step by step instructions so I had to piece this stuff together bit by bit. Hence this post – it will explain all you need to do. From start to finish, I’d allow about 1.5 hours – if you finish early that’s a bonus but none of this stuff is totally trivial so allow time to get it all done.

Start by updating iTunes to 10.5 on your PC. If you haven’t done this – you do this from inside iTunes. Then, connect your iPad to your PC and update the iPad to iOS 5 – this might take some time depending on how much data you have on your iPad as everything will be backed up – then reinstalled once the operating system is updated.

While iTunes is updating and iOS 5 is being configured, you can – on your PC – visit the Apple site at http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1455 and download and install the iCloud control panel for Windows.

Back on your iPad when everything is running again, go into Settings and create your iCloud account.

On the iPad, in Settings > iCloud you can set up syncing for email and other items such as your Photo Stream and Documents & Data. For Documents & Data you have a choice of using your cellular data plan to upload or Wi-Fi only – for your Photo Stream you can only synch this using Wi-Fi.

If you have Numbers, Pages and/or Keynote installed, in Settings select these each in turn and enable the Use iCloud option – you need to turn this On before any of these apps will access iCloud.

iCloud can be accessed on your PC by opening the system tray and clicking on its icon – if it isn’t there, choose the Start menu and type iCloud. Use the settings to configure how and what you want your iCloud and iPad to share. For example, click Photo Stream and configure a folder for images to upload to the iPad and one to use to download into. On the PC you can select whether email, contacts and Calendars & Tasks should be shared with Outlook. I suggest you backup your Outlook pst file before you even consider enabling this!

So far you have everything working except your documents. For this, confusingly enough, you head back to your PC and crank up your browser and visit www.icloud.com. Sign in using your Apple ID. If prompted you should download and install the browser plug-in.

Here you will find links for Keynote, Numbers and Pages. Click on one of them to view the documents synched from your iPad – first time you do this it might take a while as the synching takes place.

In future, every time you create a document on your iPad or edit one it will be synched automatically and will appear in this list.

Although it is not obvious that you can do this, you can also drag and drop a document, spreadsheet or PowerPoint document into the appropriate panel and it will be synched with your iPad. You can double click a document in the list to download it to the appropriate application on your computer – here I’ve chosen a Pages document which will open in Word.

You can also now share documents with others who have Apple IDs using iWork. So, on your iPad, open a document, spreadsheet or presentation and click Share and Print (it looks like a spanner) and choose Share via iWork.com. Type the email address of the person you want to share it with and they will receive an invitation to view the shared document:

 

 

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am7 Comments links to this post