iCloud can seem baffling, which is why we offer classes on it frequently (and which is why that’s one of the most popular classes we offer). Today we thought we’d talk about why we like Photostream — and how it can do more than you are probably using.

Photostream pushes photos that you’ve taken on one device to your other devices. “Push”, in this case, simply means that the photo is being sent from your phone to Apple’s iCloud servers and from there to your other devices. So if you take a photo with your iPhone, it’s sent to iCloud (over a wifi connection) and then iCloud sends it to your iPad and computer. On your iOS devices, it simply reads the photos from the cloud, so it doesn’t take any additional space. On your computer, it will import the photos in so you can keep a complete master library.

It will hold your last 1000 photos, and you can remove pictures from it manually as needed. You can also manually add photos from it to your camera roll to store permanently. New photos are stored for 30 days.

You can also create shared photo streams that you can send to folks with or without an iOS device. On an iOS device or compatible computer, they’ll simply have the option to subscribe to your photo stream. They’ll even receive an alert when new photos are added. For people without an apple id, you can share it as a public website that they can visit.