Photo Stream Workflow for Multiple Accounts?

[mscriv]

Okay, so I'm trying to set up Photo Stream in the most beneficial way for my wife and I to use. We have separate iCloud accounts for each of our iPhones and I was just wondering if some of you with more experience could share your wisdom on how you manage everything.

First off, every picture taken on my phone will be placed in my Photo Stream and sent to each device set up with that iCloud/Photo Stream account. For us that means the pictures will be placed in iPhoto on our home iMac. That is our primary family computer and my iCloud account is the one logged in through System Preferences. So, in iPhoto the pics from the Photo Stream are then automatically saved in the Events and Pictures sections so no photo is ever "lost". Here's my question, how does this automatic saving of photos affect the way I manage my images? What if I take a bad picture that I don't want to keep or intentionally take a photo for temporary purposes? Does that mean I now have to delete that photo from multiple locations, the Photo Stream and Events/Pictures in iPhoto? Is there a simple workflow or way to delete photos from one location prior to the automatic back up in iPhoto? I want Photo Stream to help me without adding additional management work to me.

Second, since only one iCloud account can be logged in at a time on OSX and iPhoto is there a simple way to manage multiple Photo Streams? The only thought I have thus far is to set up a shared Photo Stream between my wife and I where she can add any pictures that she wants to save to the iMac. Then they would just automatically show up on my account in the shared Photo Stream, correct? I'm just trying to think of how we can do this without setting up a separate user account and thus a separate iPhoto library for her. We want to keep things under one user and one iPhoto library. We also don't want to have to constantly be switching (logging in and out) between two iCloud accounts in OSX. How are some of you other families out there managing multiple Photo Streams on one computer?

Thanks for your help everyone, I love being a part of the MR community because we're so helpful to one another with stuff like this.

 

[mscriv]

Hmm... no responses yet. So, either people don't know how to best manage their Photo Stream when it comes to multiple accounts or they just want to keep it a secret?

 

[lemieuxfan67]

I know this is not "recommended" and does not meet your criteria of multiple users, but this works for us.

My wife and I each have our own user account and iCloud accounts. I set up our iPhoto library to be shared so both user accounts on our iMac can access the same iPhoto library. Each of our user accounts has our own iCloud accounts attached.

When I want to sync my photo stream, I open iPhoto under my account. I make sure to keep iPhoto closed whenever I am not using it. When my wife wants to sync her photo stream, she just opens iPhoto under her account. The only pain is being very careful to make sure the other user account has iPhoto closed. If both are open at same time (and sharing library) then it could cause issues with the iPhoto library. After the photo stream syncs, I usually spend time creating events and moving pictures from the photo stream event that is created.

It my not be the best method, but it is the easiest that I found.

I was not always a fan of separate user accounts on the iMac until we each got iPhones. Separate user accounts lets us sync all of our iCloud data (safari tabs, contacts, calendar, notes, reminders, and soon to come keychain passwords). Instead of logging in and out of Facebook, twitter, gmail, etc. we just have to quick user switch between our mac accounts.