Turn a Photo Stream into a public website easily

I’ve been using an iPhone since the first one launched in 2007, so almost 6 years. And in that time, I feel like I’ve learned most of the ins and outs of iOS. Like many of you, I’m the one friends and family come to with their tech questions.

But I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know everything about Apple’s mobile OS, as I learn new stuff everyday. And yesterday, I found out that you can turn your Photo Streams into websites, viewable by anyone, in just a few easy steps…

Ok, so I remember Apple saying something about this feature when they introduced Shared Photo Streams last summer. But since I don’t use Photo Stream at all, I never did any further digging on it. Now that I have, though, it’s kind of cool.

Here are the steps (hat tip to OSXDaily):

• First, you’ll want to make sure Photo Stream and Shared Photo Streams are enabled on your device by opening the Settings app and tapping on the Photos and Camera tab.
• Now open up your Photos app, select the Photo Stream tab in the bottom right-hand corner, and then tap the blue arrow icon to the right of the Photo Stream you’d like to turn into a website.
• After doing that, you should see a screen like the one above. And this is where you’ll enable the ‘Public Website’ feature. It may take a while, but iOS will publish your Photo Stream to an iCloud.com website.
• That’s all there is to it! If you want to share the site’s URL, shut down the website, or delete the Photo Stream all together, simply open the Photos app again, select the Photo Stream tab, and tap on the blue arrow icon.

Of course, this method is really for folks who already have active Shared Photo Streams. As aforementioned, I didn’t. So I followed the first two steps, but instead of tapping the arrow icon, I tapped the ‘Add’ button in the top left-hand corner.

This allowed me to create a new Shared Photo Stream, where I manually added photos I took at the beach this past weekend from my camera roll. And I was then able to send the link to the website out to friends and family. No fuss, no muss.

 

 

Yes, there are literally dozens of sites and services out there for sharing photos. But for quickly sharing a specific set of photos—say from a vacation—I’m not sure many of them are better suited than this. It literally took me less than a minute.

To those of you who already knew how to do this, more power to you. But for those of you who didn’t, this is a pretty cool trick huh? 

Categories: How to , iPhone , Photo Stream , Photography , Photos , Shared Photo Streams , Tutorial