If you’ve got an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch running iOS 5 or later, chance are you’ve signed up for a free iCloud account. iCloud is a pretty nifty little service that gives iDevice users a bunch of free options to use with their Apple gadget, one of which is Photo Stream. Once you’ve enabled Photo Stream on your device, any pictures you take or screen shots you make will automatically get uploaded to the internet on your own Photo Stream. Photo Stream can be really great when used with iPhoto because all your pictures will already be on your computer without you having to connect a cable and sync anything, pretty slick. Well, lets say that you don’t have iPhoto running all the time. That means you’ll have to wait for iPhoto to open and retrieve the new photos from your iCloud account. I’m gonna show you a cool little trick to getting Photo Stream in your Finder sidebar or even in your Dock.

1. Get Started

Assuming you have iCloud and use Photo Stream, you’ll need to access your Finder’s Library folder. The easiest way to do this is to click on the Finder icon in your Dock, then click on the word “Go” from the menubar. With the “Go” menu open, press and hold down the “option” key on your keyboard. Library will appear in the list where it wasn’t before. Click on Library and navigate to Application Support > iLifeAssesManagement > assets > sub. Within this folder are all your Photo Stream photos. In the search bar, type the word “image”.

2. Keep Going

From the Kinds menu that appears, select “Image”. Next, click on “sub” from the gray bar, and then click the “Save” button under the search bar. A little diaglog box appears that lets you rename the Smart Folder we are creating and will let you add it to your sidebar. Just leave the save location as the default “Saved Searches”. This is a great option if you want quick access to your pictures from photo stream. If you want them even faster, next, I’ll explain how to add this folder to your dock.

3. Options

Right click on the Smart Folder you just created in your sidebar and select “Open Enclosing Folder” from the menu. You’ll notice you can also remove the folder from the sidebar if you don’t want or need it there anymore. Once you’ve opened the enclosing folder, you’ll see a folder with the name you gave your saved search.

Now, just click and drag it to your dock. Because it’s a folder, you’ll only be able to put it next to other folders or next to your trash. Now you have quick one click access to the photos from your Photo Stream without having to waiting for iPhoto. Unfortunately, this is a one way process, there is now way to drag photos into this folder and have them appear on your iDevice. Nevertheless, I’ve found this emensly helpful and hope you will too.

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