Basic iCloud Question(s)

[tawcat]

Being that we are a Mac family, 2 iPads, an Airbook, and an iMac, I am trying to decide to use iCloud or not.

My wife's pad is 16GB so I don't want to overload whatever she may have remaining.

Does iCloud work like Dropbox? i.e. store stuff there and access at will from whatever device. Or does iCloud stream and place copies of photos, docs, music, etc on each device?

I'm really sorry for such a basic question, but in all the reading I've done, I just really don't understand how it works.

Thanks.

 

[Weaselboy]

It won't use much space. Let's say you have 50 Pages or Numbers documents in iCloud. If you turn in iCloud on the iPad it will only pull in documents you open in Pages or Number on the iPad, it won't auto pull in all 50 and fill up the iPad.

Or if you like, you could just turn on iCloud for all the other features and just turn off documents sync in the iCloud settings.

 

[tawcat]

It won't use much space. Let's say you have 50 Pages or Numbers documents in iCloud. If you turn in iCloud on the iPad it will only pull in documents you open in Pages or Number on the iPad, it won't auto pull in all 50 and fill up the iPad.

Or if you like, you could just turn on iCloud for all the other features and just turn off documents sync in the iCloud settings.

What about photos?

 

[Weaselboy]

What about photos?

You can control that also. If you turn on Photo Stream in iCloud it will only sync photos put in the Photostream section of iPhoto. It is really more for automatically sending photos you take on the iOS device to iCloud then automatically to iPhoto. It avoids you having to plug in to iTunes to move photos to the Mac in iPhoto.

What I do it start iPhoto on the Mac once a week or so and make sure the Photo Stream photos got imported locally to the Mac, then delete them from Photo Stream. There is a setting in iPhoto on the Mac to auto import Photo Stream photos.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

We have three iDevices used by three different family members in our family.

We use separate iCloud accounts.

We have shared photostreams between us, so that, for example, if I take a good picture of my daughter at her soccer practice, she and my wife will see it in their subscribed-streams. And we can add photos to each other streams, too. That saves on space, since our shared photos are spread between three different iCloud accounts.

 

[tawcat]

Got it, I think! Thanks for the input.