My Photo Stream and Shared Albums limits

My Photo Stream is shutting down on July 26, 2023. Learn more about this transition and how to use iCloud Photos to keep your photos up to date across all your devices.

The My Photo Stream limits below are based on anticipated upload patterns. These are the My Photo Stream upload limits:

• 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

If you exceed one of these limits, your uploads to My Photo Stream will pause temporarily, and you might see a notification on your device. Your uploads will resume automatically when you no longer exceed the limit, such as in the following hour or on the following day.

Sharing Suggestions are limited to 5000 items with a maximum share size of 1GB.

These are the Shared Albums hourly and daily limits:

• Maximum number of photos and videos from a single contributor across all shared albums, per hour: 1000
• Maximum number of photos and videos from a single contributor across all shared albums, per day: 10,000

These sharing limits are separate from the upload limits above. For example, in the same day you could upload 10,000 photos to My Photo Stream, then share those 10,000 photos or 10,000 other photos.

Some additional limits for shared albums:

• Maximum shared albums an owner can share: 200
• Maximum shared albums a user can subscribe to: 200
• Maximum subscribers per shared album: 100 (the number of subscribers on each shared album)
• Maximum combined number of photos and videos from all contributors in any one shared album: 5000
• Maximum number of comments per photo or video in a shared album: 200 (a comment can be either a like or a text entry)
• Maximum characters per comment: 1024
• Maximum number of invites a shared album owner may send per day: 200

Photos uploaded to Shared Albums or My Photo Stream don't count against your iCloud storage. iCloud stores the photos that you upload to My Photo Stream for 30 days to give your devices plenty of time to connect to iCloud and download them. Find out how to save photos from My Photo Stream or a shared album to your device.

These file types are supported:

• Images for My Photo Stream: JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and most RAW formats.
• Video and file formats for Shared Albums: MP4 and QuickTime file types, and H.264 and MPEG-4 Video file formats. Videos can be up to 15 minutes in length.

Keep the following in mind when you import photos:

• When you import photos to an iPad or iPhone using the Camera Connection Kit, photos save directly to your Photos tab. If My Photo Stream is on and you're connected to a wireless network, you could reach any of the above limits. To avoid this, turn off My Photo Stream when you import photos to iPad or iPhone using the Camera Connection Kit.
• When you import large numbers of photos to either iPhoto or Aperture, you could potentially reach any of the limits listed above if you selected Automatic Upload in My Photo Stream preferences. Both iPhoto and Aperture will pause uploading to My Photo Stream when they reach the maximum. Uploading will automatically restart at the next hour, day, or month, depending on which limit was reached.
• If you enabled iCloud Photos on your iOS 8.3 device or on OS X Yosemite v10.10.3, My Photo Stream will upload your most recent photos to share with devices not using iCloud Photos. My Photo Stream photos will be automatically added to your All Photos album for devices with iCloud Photos enabled.

Due to storage limitations, your Apple TV might display only your most recent photos.