Significant Changes to iCloud Photo Stream and Photo Sharing Limits

On Saturday, Daring Fireball reported that significant changes had been made to iCloud Photo Stream and Photo Sharing limits. These are the current limits:

The My Photo Stream limits below are established based on anticipated upload patterns. Currently, My Photo Stream upload limits are as follows:

  • Uploads to My Photo Stream per hour: 1000 photos
  • Uploads to My Photo Stream per day: 10,000 photos
  • Uploads to My Photo Stream per month: 25,000 photos

The changes are great news for iOS users. The per-account Photo Stream limit used to be 1,000 photos in total. Now they are 1,000 photos per day and 25,000 per month. This makes the limit more of a throttle on uploads than anything else.

As John Gruber said, the most confusing aspect of these changes is why they are still limiting the life of photos in the Photo Stream to 30 days, "The photos that you upload to My Photo Stream are stored in iCloud for 30 days to give your devices plenty of time to connect to iCloud and download them." Perhaps this limit will be modified in some way in the near future.