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Solutions to your most vexing Mac problems.

- GLENN FLEISHMAN

APPLE PHOTOS, iCLOUD PHOTOS, AND MY PHOTO STREAM: FIGURING OUT WHAT TO USE

When online and local storage were scarcer, Apple added an interesting option to let you have access to recent photos captured or imported across all your mobile and desktop devices. What’s now called My Photo Stream, when enabled, would feed newly taken photos (but not videos) to all other connected devices, so you could view them on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV.

The service at introduction and today keeps up to 1,000 images for up to 30 days. It only starts removing the oldest images when the set of photos from the 30 days exceeds 1,000 or when an image is more than 30 days old. The space occupied by My Photo Stream doesn’t count against iCloud storage. Images are never deleted from their source devices— only from the copy in the stream.

But you may no longer have a reason keep My Photo Stream turned on. In fact, it might be storing images permanently that you never intended to collect in that fashion.

With iCloud Photos Enabled

If you’re using iCloud Photos on your devices, you don’t need My Photo Stream at all. iCloud Photos syncs all photos and videos across all devices that are logged into the same iCloud account and have iCloud Photos enabled (Photos → Preferences → iCloud in macOS; Settings → account name → iCloud → Photos in iOS and iPadOS).