Manual iCloud.com photo uploads now available to all Apple users

By Katie Marsal

After spending a few weeks in developer-only beta testing, the new iCloud.com photo uploading feature is now available on the Web to all Apple users with iCloud accounts.

As of Friday, the upload feature on iCloud Photos is now accessible to all users. The new "Upload" option appears next to "Select Photos" in the iCloud Photos section of iCloud.com

Clicking the "Upload" button allows users to add .JPG images to their iCloud Photo cache for browsing on iOS and Mac devices. The button brings up a Finder window from which users can select single images or batches of photos to send to iCloud.

Once the pictures have been uploaded, they are then pushed down to iPhones, iPads and Mac signed in to the associated iCloud account. They can also be made available to users granted access to images via iCloud Photo Sharing.

iCloud Photos, known as iCloud Photo Library on iOS 8, lets users automatically upload photos and video from their Camera Roll for storage and cross-device syncing and download. The feature is similar to Photo Stream in iOS 7, but with support for full-resolution content and edit syncing.

iCloud Photos remains labeled as a beta. As of Friday's launch, it only supports .JPG videos, and will not accept images in other formats. It also cannot be used to upload video files.