This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
iCloud and the associated Photo Stream may primarily be best suited to users of Apple Macs but for those of you who still need access via Windows 7 these steps will be important for you.
Firstly you will need to download the iCloud Control Panel fromhttp://support.apple.com/kb/DL1455
Simply click on download to proceed. Please note in order to create an iCloud account that you can use with your Windows PC you will need to sign up via a iOS device with iOS 5 or a Mac with OS X Lion 10.7.2
It should also be noted your system will need to be running Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7, Safari 5.1.1 or Internet Explorer 8 or later, and to use Mail, Contacts and Calendars you will need to be running Microsoft Outlook 2007 or later.
Once downloaded simply run the install package and follow the onscreen step by step instructions.
Upon successfully installation you will be able to start the iCloud Control Panel. Simply sign in with your username and password as shown below:
Upon successful login you will be presented with the following view:
You will notice that as I do not have Outlook installed on this PC that some of the features are greyed out and therefore unavailable.
We do however in this example want to use Photo Stream which does not require any additional software.
By default Photo Stream is switched off. Simply click the activation box next to Photo Stream and the Options button to the right hand side will become active.
Clicking the Options button will present the following window of information:
You will notice you have two folders assigned. One for download and one for upload. The download folder is the one which any photographs taken on your iOS devices or added in iPhoto on your Mac will be downloaded to.
The upload folder allows you to simply add additional photographs from your Windows PC to Photo Stream. These photographs will be then streamed to all your connected devices. Please remember only 1000 photographs will be stored in the Photo Stream at any given time and they will be removed after 30 days. Hence, I would advise to not put original photographs into the uploads folder. Simply copy and paste any photographs in order to avoid accidental deletion by the system.
You can also change the location of these folders by clicking Change and selecting a folder on a drive of your choice to act as either the download or upload folder.
When satisfied with the folder locations simply press okay then click Apply in the main iCloud settings window.
I have left the Photo Stream download folder as the default option. Hence all you need to do is navigate to Home\Pictures\Photo Stream\My Photo Stream
Depending on how many photographs you currently have in the Photo Stream and the data connection the initial download process may take a significant amount of time.
Should you wish to access the iCloud control panel for future changes simply navigate to the Start Menu > Control Panel > iCloud which will then launch the iCloud Control Panel.