Do you find Photo Stream useful?

[sharonfrommpls]

While some of the iCloud features are obviously useful (iCloud backup, for instance) I am baffled by Photo Stream. I can see why it might be useful to sync your Contacts from multiple devices to a central "cloud" location. But why would anybody want an unfiltered, unmanageable stream of pictures from multiple devices constantly appearing on their iPhone?

Apple has a very cute video on their website showing how a family might use this feature. Mom takes a bunch of adorable pictures of the kids' soccer game on her iphone and then heads home. As soon as the minivan pulls up at the door, little tike races inside and excitedly opens up the family iPad to see the pictures. Awww. But think about it. Does Mom ONLY use her iPhone camera for pictures of the kids? Does she really want every picture she takes to be streamed instantly to the iPad? The 2 dozen pictures she took at Marge's going-away lunch, the bar-code she scanned while shopping, the accidental picture of her foot? And if that iPad has a camera in it and the kids start playing with it, she could open up her iPhone Photo app tomorrow and find 500 pictures of the family cat.

The one scenario I can think of where Photostream would be cool is as a one-way conduit between your iPhone and your computer. If you're the type of photographer who likes to take a lot of pictures without really looking at them and then sort them out later on the computer, it would be great.

But I just don't see the advantage of syncing all the pictures both ways from the cloud to every device in the household.

This isn't a hater thread. Photo Stream is a cool technology, and I'm sure that it could be good for something with a little tweaking. And if it's never useful to me, nobody is making me enable it. I'm just curious to know if people are finding it to be useful in its current state. And if not, what would make it something that you would want to use?

 

[Skull One]

Very useful to me. I have my wife's iPad2 and iPhone 4 plus my iPhone 4S and iMac sunk to it. Now when we take pictures of our grandchildren, it is available to all of our devices very quickly without ever having to download and then transfer each photo to each device thru iTunes.

 

[DaveM]

I agree that it's unmanageable. It would be useful if I could delete specific pictures at will. The only option for deleting pictures is a function that's supposed to reset the Photo Stream, which erases everything. And, btw, I have not yet been able to get that to work in either IE or Safari. I like the idea, but so far it's a far cry from being what it ought to be.

 

[SingingSabre]

I won't use it until I can delete photos from it at will for the same reason I'm sure many share.

 

[Skull One]

I would like to clarify that 30 day comment. When a picture reaches 30 days old it is cleared. Not the entire photo stream.

 

[Skull One]

Agreed 100%. And I also agree that Apple needs to fix the situation properly by allowing the user to delete pre 30 days / 1000 photos.

 

[iHolophyte]

You can just turn it off, it then alerts you by doing so will delete all photos. They are still in your camera roll though. So activate it as needed until updates are added


Sent from my iPhone 4 iOS 5 using Tapatalk

 

[sharonfrommpls]

Clearly a lot of people are unhappy with the inability to delete individual pictures from PhotoStream. But even if that feature were added (as I suspect it will be), I still don't see it as desirable to propagate every picture taken with every device to every other device. Skull One is the only respondent to address that. I gather that in his family, most of the pictures he and his wife take are family photos that they are eager to share. Okay, that's one perfectly valid response.

Anybody else? After thinking it over, I realize that my perplexity about this feature stems from this: I think of my iPhone as a very personal device. Although I do take a lot of family photos, I also use my iPhone for things that are not inappropriate, but just aren't of interest to anybody else. I take pictures of errors on my computer console to attach to bug reports, pictures of my co-workers to attach to my contact list, pictures of my lunch. I take a lot of pictures while experimenting with apps and camera features. And I take tons of pictures that I delete almost immediately because they just aren't very good. I don't want to open up the family iPad at home and find a bunch of ugly pictures that I didn't even bother to keep on my own camera.

Am I the one that's strange? Do most people want to share pretty much everything they take a picture of? Even more to the point, do most people want to see every single picture that all their family members take?

 

[DaveM]

You can just turn it off, it then alerts you by doing so will delete all photos. They are still in your camera roll though. So activate it as needed until updates are added

I actually tried that and it didn't work for me. It's good news though about photos being cycled out of the queue every 30 days. That's useful information that I didn't know.

 

[sharonfrommpls]

"You can just turn it off, it then alerts you by doing so will delete all photos."

If you deactivate Photostream on your device, the "Photostream" album disappears. However, as soon as you activate Photostream again, all the pictures that were already uploaded into the cloud reappear on your device.

If you want to get rid of the uploaded pictures completely, you have to do the following:

1) Deactivate PhotoStream on all devices. This makes the "PhotoStream" album disappear from your device. However, if you have saved any of those pictures into Camera Roll, they will not be deleted from there.

2) Login to iCloud through a browser and Reset Photo Stream (right-click on your name, select Advanced).

Now if you reenable PhotoStream on your device, the PhotoStream album will be empty until you take another picture.

 

[DaveM]

"You can just turn it off, it then alerts you by doing so will delete all photos."

If you deactivate Photostream on your device, the "Photostream" album disappears. However, as soon as you activate Photostream again, all the pictures that were already uploaded into the cloud reappear on your device.

If you want to get rid of the uploaded pictures completely, you have to do the following:

1) Deactivate PhotoStream on all devices. This makes the "PhotoStream" album disappear from your device. However, if you have saved any of those pictures into Camera Roll, they will not be deleted from there.

2) Login to iCloud through a browser and Reset Photo Stream (right-click on your name, select Advanced).

Now if you reenable PhotoStream on your device, the PhotoStream album will be empty until you take another picture.

You really got me hopes up for a bit there Sharon. I thought that maybe the missing key was that I had to have Photo Stream disabled in order to get the reset to work. But I turned it off and then tried the reset and I get the same error that I've gotten from the beginning - that the Photo Stream couldn't be reset due to a network error. Then of course when I turn Photo Stream back on on the phone everything appears again.

 

[iHolophyte]

You really got me hopes up for a bit there Sharon. I thought that maybe the missing key was that I had to have Photo Stream disabled in order to get the reset to work. But I turned it off and then tried the reset and I get the same error that I've gotten from the beginning - that the Photo Stream couldn't be reset due to a network error. Then of course when I turn Photo Stream back on on the phone everything appears again.

I can see this being a good long drawn out argument/information/answers to a much new iCloud service 😄it's what the forum needs.


Sent from my iPhone 4 iOS 5 using Tapatalk

 

[Pinkpoison]

I agree that it's unmanageable. It would be useful if I could delete specific pictures at will. The only option for deleting pictures is a function that's supposed to reset the Photo Stream, which erases everything. And, btw, I have not yet been able to get that to work in either IE or Safari. I like the idea, but so far it's a far cry from being what it ought to be.

I was on the phone with apple techsupport for 2hrs trying to delete photos from iphoto,he didnt know that its not possible unless you reset or disable it,i only realized after,this needs sorting out so we have a delete option.

 

[ectopudding]

I personally don't find it useful, and it's a bit inconsistent on my end. For some reason, it's picky on what photos it wants, and it's inconsistent with how the photo was obtained.

For example: I'll take pics, and they will appear in my iCloud photo stream, and I'll even save photos from MMS messages, and most if not all will also appear my photo stream. But sometimes, I'll take screen shots, and some will appear in my photo stream, and even grab images from the Facebook app, or Internet, and only a few of the photos i snagged will update, and appear within my photo stream. And the same applies visa versa.

I don't know if Its a server problem, connectivity problem, or a file type problem, then again, nor do I care what the problem is.

As of yet, iCloud photo stream is dead to me. LOL.

 

[sharonfrommpls]

Well - they created something wonderful with iPhoto Stream. They just didn't implement it in the typical Apple way - with the user in mind more than anything else. By iOS 5.1 or 5.2 it will all be worked out and the way the system will normally work is: you take a photo and right where you would look at the photo and hit save - it'll have a little button for "Save + Stream" or just "Save". Then as you touch the tab for photo stream you'll be able to hit an edit button, get the little circles where the checkmarks can appear - if you tap on them putting checkmarks then just choose erase from stream.

Apple are you're reading this thread? I just solved your problem...

I love your implementation, NewDestinyX! I hope they do it just that way. However, I think Apple's esthetic values simplicity over giving the user a lot of options. I'll bet they leave the Photo Stream sync completely automatic, but introduce a way to delete pictures from Photo Stream after the fact.

It's not completely obvious how Photo Stream deletion should work. If you take a picture on your iPhone, it appears in Photo Stream on your device and is synced to the cloud. Should you be able to delete it from the cloud by deleting it from Photo Stream on your own iPhone? And if you do that, will it then disappear from all the devices it was synced to? Should any of the clustered devices be able to delete any photo? Or should it only be possible to delete a photo from the device where it originated? (I vote for that one).

The other approach would be to allow photos to be deleted only from the Photo Stream in the cloud, using a web browser. I'm guessing that this is how the delete will ultimately be implemented. That seems to be the way synced Contacts are managed. First, of course, they have to make Photo Stream accessible from iCloud. Maybe that turned out to be harder than anticipated, which is why it wasn't implemented in the original rollout.