No, photos won't be permanently deleted from your iPhone later this month

(The Hill) - Despite some fears voiced by customers online, Apple will not be mass-deleting user photos from its devices near the end of the month.

The tech giant recently announced that it will be doing away with its My Photo Stream service on July 26, but that doesn’t mean photos are going away anytime soon.

The My Photo Stream service uploads users' most recent 1,000 photos to iCloud automatically, for free, enabling access to them on any of a customer's Apple devices for 30 days after they’re taken. 

The service already stopped automatically uploading photos on June 26, exactly 30 days before the planned shut down.

With that going away, users can no longer — as easily — take photos on their iPhone and access them on their iPad, for example. But those photos are still accessible on the device they were taken.

“The photos in My Photo Stream are already stored on at least one of your devices, so as long as you have the device with your originals, you won’t lose any photos as part of this process,” Apple says on its support page.

Users should move the photos they still want all-device access to into iCloud Photos. Everything else will only be automatically accessible on the device where it originated. 

Apple offered a guide for users to maintain their desired access.