Why those extra 5GB of iCloud aren’t worth it

Got an email this morning. Which mysteriously then disappeared - never have got the hang of that strange me.com email address. But I saw enough to know I would soon be charged £14.00 to continue my iCloud storage of 10GB (instead of the free 5GB). Having photos automatically backed up in the Photo Stream of the iCloud seemed great at first. Come home from a hard day’s shooting and miraculously all my photos are on my iPad. My eyes and fingers were so pleased to be editing on the iPad’s larger screen. Then I realised that after 1,000 photos, the first ones got deleted (not such good back-up), and then I found out that the photos on the Photo Stream had about 60% fewer pixels than the original photos.

If you use Instagram all the photos you upload also go to Statigram (and a host of other web-based Insta-platforms), and so you also get a free back-up archive. To get a copy of one of your own photos on Instagram (or in fact a copy of anyone else’s) you just view the image large and then drag and drop it into a folder on your hard drive. But you lose a load of pixels in the process, just like via the iCloud. But it’s free and it stores every photo you ever published to Instagram, which in my case is more than 1,000.

The only way to keep all your pixels is to upload your photos from your iPhone to your hard drive in an app like Aperture, Lightroom or iPhoto. And to save your eyes and fingers you can use an app like Scotty to beam your photos from iPhone to iPad. I’m watching the pennies, so I don’t think I’m going to renew my iCloud storage.

Are you losing pixels in the iCloud?