ICloud won't load My Photo Stream to PC

Question

I had approximately 800 photos in "My Photo Stream" on my iPhone 4S with iCloud turned on. The phone was stolen and I want to ensure that I'm still going to be able to access those photos when my replacement phone arrives. However, when trying to load the photos from "My Photo Stream" to my PC, only 17 of the 800 or so actually synched to it, even though

Answer 1

If you have a backup of your phone in iTunes or in iCloud you should be fine - photos are stored in the backup. If you have to rely on Photo Stream however you will be out of luck. Photo Stream is rather odd in the way it works. It only keeps 30 days of photos "in the cloud", but it leaves copies on any devices that synced with it. So you would still see older photos on your devices or on any PC that synced, although the cloud only had the last 30 days. I can see how this would lead you to believe you had all those photos in iCloud, but in fact you did not .
The new iCloud Photo Library (available in beta on IOS 8.1) is much clearer - photos stay there until deleted, but it does take up iCloud storage space, when Photo Stream did not.
But hopefully you have a backup of your phone and all will be fine.