Apple iCloud Photos now compatible with Windows 11 Photos

Image credit: Microsoft

Microsoft has begun rolling out iCloud Photos integration in Windows 11, with the feature available to all users by the end of November.

Microsoft announced that Apple would be integrating more of its services with Windows 11, including Apple Music and Apple TV. On Wednesday, users began getting updates that enable iCloud Photos to sync with the Windows 11 Photos app.

According to a report from The Verge, an update to the Photos app in Windows 11 is being is being rolled out, and will be available to all users by the end of November. Users will still need the Apple iCloud app from the Windows store to perform account linking.

"We know that many Windows customers have photo and video collections on their iPhones that they would like to be able to view on their PC," says Dave Grochocki, principal product manager lead for Microsoft's Windows inbox apps. "This iCloud Photos integration will make it easier for those with an iPhone to have direct access to all their cherished memories in one organized place and is another step in our continued efforts to make experiences on Windows 11 seamless."

Install the iCloud app from the Windows store and ensure the Windows Photos app is up to date. Once linked, users' photos should appear in the Photos app automatically.

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5 Comments

MatrixMetering

said about 1 year ago

This entire rollout has been confusing. I'm a Windows user that has been using iCloud on my PC for ages. My iCloud Photos have always shown in the Windows Photos app because iCloud conveniently drops an iCloud Photos link into the Pictures folder on Windows. So what exactly is this integration supposed to do? When I click on the newly added iCloud Photos link in the Photos app I get an "Oops! Please add iCloud to Folders. You need to add your iCloud Photos folder to the folders section to see your photos" notification. WTF?!

CheeseFreeze

said about 1 year ago

I hope Apple will come with a decent API for third-party integrations. For example, I would like to sync Apple Photos with my Synology. The problem is, Synology has no true access to Apple Photos in the sense that it can do calls to the back-end on my behalf. It needs an iOS app to scan for changes to Photos and then replicate those actions on Synology. This is not syncing, because when I remove something from Synology (or Apple Photos), this is not reflected on Synology. It is simply accumulating photos.
This way, I will soon hit my 2TB space, and end up with a problem. I want to properly have my photos - with all metadata - backed up, so I can free up space on Photos.
Apple’s closed approach sucks.

dewme

said about 1 year ago

MatrixMetering said:

This entire rollout has been confusing. I'm a Windows user that has been using iCloud on my PC for ages. My iCloud Photos have always shown in the Windows Photos app because iCloud conveniently drops an iCloud Photos link into the Pictures folder on Windows. So what exactly is this integration supposed to do? When I click on the newly added iCloud Photos link in the Photos app I get an "Oops! Please add iCloud to Folders. You need to add your iCloud Photos folder to the folders section to see your photos" notification. WTF?!

Me too. I’ve always been able to view my Apple Photos content on my Windows PCs.

I’m a bit apprehensive when it comes to integrating any Apple or macOS content too closely with Windows. I don’t mind “wasting” storage space on my Windows machines by allowing Windows to store duplicates of content imported from my Apple account, like photos. However I get very nervous if Microsoft apps are able to delete content that’s natively managed on the Apple side by an Apple exclusive app.

In other words, I’m okay with Microsoft’s photo app copying photos from iCloud but if I delete/modify them from the Windows photo app I don’t want to sync those changes back to iCloud. Yeah, this is a half baked level of integration but one that’s based on my needs and reluctance to allow Microsoft to change content that I see as being managed by Apple apps.

I ran into an issue recently when I tried using Microsoft Outlook as my default mail client on both my Apple devices and Microsoft devices and allowing it to access my Apple Contacts. For reasons unknown to me I ended up with most of my Apple contacts obliterated on all of my machines, Mac and Windows. Fortunately I had backups, but I’m still gun shy about allowing too much integration between the two worlds.

To be clear, I do use Microsoft Office and allow it full access to Office documents that are stored on iCloud from either Mac or Windows. I have never experienced any issues with this setup and would be okay using OneDrive in the same capacity.

The difference here is that these documents are managed by Office and it exists on both platforms. My issue with Contacts involved granting a Microsoft app access to content that’s managed by an Apple exclusive app. The sharing broke. If Microsoft or any other 3rd party had a Contacts app that ran on both platforms like Word and Excel do, I’d be okay with the same app on either platform having full access to the contacts content. To me, this isn’t a sharing relationship because ownership doesn’t cross app boundaries.

dewme

said about 1 year ago

CheeseFreeze said:

I hope Apple will come with a decent API for third-party integrations. For example, I would like to sync Apple Photos with my Synology. The problem is, Synology has no true access to Apple Photos in the sense that it can do calls to the back-end on my behalf. It needs an iOS app to scan for changes to Photos and then replicate those actions on Synology. This is not syncing, because when I remove something from Synology (or Apple Photos), this is not reflected on Synology. It is simply accumulating photos.
This way, I will soon hit my 2TB space, and end up with a problem. I want to properly have my photos - with all metadata - backed up, so I can free up space on Photos.
Apple’s closed approach sucks.

I understand where you’re coming from when storage costs are concerned. From my previous post you can probably infer that I’m on the other side of the fence because I’m more concerned about accidental loss than duplication. Plus I’ve already sucked it up and went to the 2TB storage tier. But yeah, it’s a very legitimate concern and an overriding one for some folks.

In fact, Apple isn’t totally closed, at least on the Mac platform. Apple does allow apps like Affinity to run plugins within Photos. Going down this path removes the ambiguity about which app owns the content and changes to the content. This results in two apps following my definition of sharing but Apple’s app completely encapsulates the plugin so it’s kind of a pseudo sharing arrangement.

Apple knows how to do APIs and Apple knows how to do sharing. But doing sharing across any boundaries and especially at the operating system level requires very clear transactional semantics that both sides must fully agree to.

In my humble opinion these semantics should include at least optional journaling and rollback capabilities that limit the potential loss from unforeseen failure modes of the app specific content. To do this right either the storage side needs to have some contextual knowledge about the nature of the stored content or each app on both sides of the share boundary needs to have this knowledge. This is why I don’t have heartburn about apps like Word and Excel having full access from two different operating systems, because these apps have the contextual knowledge about the nature of the stored content regardless of the operating system they are running on.

Alex1N

said about 1 year ago

Rather than cough up for the 2TB tier (and why isn’t there a 1 TB tier, but I suspect that the answer is “gouging”), I’ve started deleting almost-duplicate photos from Apple Photos. Takes a lot longer but it’s very much cheaper.

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