Turn a Photo Stream album into a public Web site

Photo Stream is a great way to view photos across your various iOS devices. Snap some shots on your iPhone and -- boom! -- thanks to Photo Stream, they can be viewed in full on your iPad. That's how I have been using Photo Stream to date, but I've overlooked a feature that makes it easy to share a Photo Stream album with anyone, Apple and non-Apple folk alike. From either your iPhone or iPad, Photo Stream includes a feature that will create a quick Web site with your photos, whose link you can share as you wish.

To get started, you first need to have an iCloud account and make sure the Photo Stream options are turned on via Settings > iCloud > Photo Stream:

Next, you will need to create a Photo Stream album. Open the Photos app on your iOS device and tap the "+" button in the upper-left corner. Ignore the "To:" field at the top for now; we first need to add photos to this album. Give the album a name and tap the on-off switch so that it's on for Public Website. Tap the Create button in the upper-right corner and you'll see your new album listed below your complete My Photo Stream collection. To add photos to a Photo Stream album, tap on its name, tap the Edit button, and then tap the Add button to select photos.

Once you have a Photo Stream album you want to share, on an iPhone you will tap the blue arrow button to the right of the album listed on the main Photo Stream page. If the Public Website toggle switch is in the On position, you'll see a Share Link button below it along with the actual iCloud link for the album. Since you can't do anything with the actual link from this screen, tap the Share Link and you'll be able to share the link via e-mail, text, Twitter, and Facebook, or copy it to your iPhone's clipboard.

The process for sharing a link in this manner is a bit different on an iPad. The main Photo Stream page lists a grid of thumbnails instead of a list, so you won't see the blue arrow button next to each album that you get on an iPhone. Instead, tap the Edit button in the upper-right corner, tap on the album you want to share, and you'll see the Public Website toggle switch and Share Link button to disseminate the link as you see fit.

For the curious, the layout of a Photo Stream Web site looks like this:

(Via OS X Daily)