Set Up iCloud Photo Stream on Windows 8 Computer

If you wish to download photos from the Photo Stream directly to your computer running Windows 8, without having to connect to an iPhone or the iPad in between, you need to have iCloud installed in your PC. Both the iPhone as well as the iPad allows sharing as well as keeping a back-up of images with the help of Photo Stream on iOS 5 and iOS 6. This makes it fairly easy for owners of the said devices to share their photos with their PC.

Now Windows 8 users can also do the same with iCloud running on their device. The application also enables the users to directly upload images from the DLSR or just a point and shoot camera to the Photo Stream by keeping the images in a separate folder.

What’s more, both Photo Stream and iCloud are absolutely free to use and takes a mere fifteen minutes to get installed. After it is set up the photos keep coming once it is connected to the internet. However, for that to happen, you need to make sure the Photo Stream is turned on on both the iPad and the iPhone device. The way to turn on Photo Stream on both the device is selecting Settings > iCloud > Photos > My Photo Stream > On.

Users can download iCloud set up for Windows 8 from Apple directly. Although Apple does not mention the file to be for Windows 8, this is exactly what is needed. It mentions it as iCloud control panel for the Windows, with the version mentioned is 2.1.2. This same file is also expected to be compliant with Windows 8.1 as well which is expected to be launched this fall season. After the download procedure, one needs to follow the instructions and get it installed. The control panel also gets updated automatically and a user account control menu pops up suggesting if one wants to make any changes. The users then need to click yes and proceed further.

After iCloud is installed and set up on Windows 8, one needs to sign up with the Apple ID. After this, a screen mentioning a back up space for iCloud and Photo Stream is visible. In this case, iCloud will be synchronizing Photo Stream with the PC. Once the Photo Stream box is checked, the photos will start downloading to the Images folder which is placed inside the folder of Photo Stream. The users can also make changes in the settings and can pick a new location for saving the photos that are downloaded from Photo Stream.