How to synchronize photos on iOS and Mac

When you have iOS devices like an iPhone and an iPad and also a Mac sooner or later the question arises how to sync your photos between them. You may take photos with your iPhone, want to watch them on the iPad and also have some photos from another camera that will we brought in via the Mac. Also all of your photos should be archived on a save place.

There is of course the iCloud Photo Library. But if you have a lot of photos you will need the 2TB plan for 9,99€ a month which is quite a lot “just for photos”. Also you have to trust Apple that your data is safe and will not be lost.

I used the iCloud feature “My Photo Stream” which keeps the last 1000 photos of all of your devices and make those available on all of them. But there are some drawbacks.

• My Photo Stream is not reliable. It happened quite often that photos did not get into the stream or devices did not show them. This is quite annoying as you cannot rely that your photos are where they should be. That might be related to weak mobile networks but I expect system to handle that and re-send photos when initial sending has failed.
• You do not get all features with My Photo Stream. Live photos which are actually a small video are not transferred in their original form but as a simple JPEG. So on a Mac the live photos from the iPhone are just static images.

I have chosen the following solution for me. On a Mac I do not enable My Photo Stream. Instead I import the photos using the Photos app. Then I get also the Live photos. The Mac is also the central place for all the photos and I create a backup regularly.

On the iPhone and iPad I enabled the My Photo Stream to have an easy sync from iPhone to iPad. I am aware that some photos may not show up on the iPad. If I want really all photos and also those from other sources than I watch photos on the Mac.

There are also other cloud providers that promise to take care of your photos like

• Amazon Drive
• Microsoft OneDrive
• Google Photos

None of these could convince me so far to entrust them with my photos.