Photo Stream

[Cyacene]

Photo Stream looks pretty great, and I cant wait to have all my pictures show up on all my devices without having to sync them over... BUT; does anyone know if we can ADD photos manually to the photostream without actually taking the picture?

Eg. Im on vacation, and I have just taken a bunch of pictures with my Nikon camera, I get back to the hotel, move my pics over to the iPad with the Camera connection kit (SD card reader), and ideally, the rest is "magical"....

Also, were there any API's released for Photo Stream ? Hopefully Apple will open it up so Instagram etc, could get in on the action if they wanted to.

 

[marc11]

Photo Stream looks pretty great, and I cant wait to have all my pictures show up on all my devices without having to sync them over... BUT; does anyone know if we can ADD photos manually to the photostream without actually taking the picture?

Eg. Im on vacation, and I have just taken a bunch of pictures with my Nikon camera, I get back to the hotel, move my pics over to the iPad with the Camera connection kit (SD card reader), and ideally, the rest is "magical"....

Also, were there any API's released for Photo Stream ? Hopefully Apple will open it up so Instagram etc, could get in on the action if they wanted to.

From what I have read, you connect your photo device to any Apple device connected to the cloud and the photos are pushed to every other device connected to the cloud/account. Now, the limitation seems to be only the last 1000 photo's are pushed, only the last 30 days are kept and memory on those push devices can be a limiting factor.

Utter crap IMHO. Put the photo's on the web, let people look at thumb nails, full screen or download if they wish, as they wish, when they wish, how they wish. Seems Apple will tell us what we want photo wise....

 

[Cyacene]

A little more reading in to this and apple says "Take a photo with your iOS device. Or import a photo from your digital camera to your Mac or PC" There's no mention of importing a photo to your iOS device with the camera adapter kit...

Anyone with iOS5/iPad/CCK willing to give this a try?

 

[shandyman]

A little more reading in to this and apple says "Take a photo with your iOS device. Or import a photo from your digital camera to your Mac or PC" There's no mention of importing a photo to your iOS device with the camera adapter kit...

Anyone with iOS5/iPad/CCK willing to give this a try?

if it goes into your camera roll, it will go to photostream. also on the computer (at least on windows) you can manually import to the upload folder on the computer and it goes into photo stream

 

[Zaqfalcon]

A few more questions on the same issue please:

1. Can one choose which imported photos (ie from a camera) are sent to the iCloud and hence pushed to your computer?
   
2. Does your computer need to be awake in order to receive from the iCloud or will it be woken automatically?
   
3. If it does need to be awake and does not get woken automatically after 30 days then what happens?
   
4. What if your computer is out of space?
   
5. Will it be possible to store in Time Capsule for the interim?
   
6. Will there be any limitation on file size/type on photos transferred? I know it is only the last 1000 but 1000 24 megapixel RAW files is a large amount of data.
   
7. Will it be possible to buy more than 1000 transfers?

If the iCloud works how I hope then it and an iPad will make an excellent additional back up solution whilst on long trips.

Thanks for your input.

 

[shandyman]

A few more questions on the same issue please:

1. Can one choose which imported photos (ie from a camera) are sent to the iCloud and hence pushed to your computer?
   
2. Does your computer need to be awake in order to receive from the iCloud or will it be woken automatically?
   
3. If it does need to be awake and does not get woken automatically after 30 days then what happens?
   
4. What if your computer is out of space?
   
5. Will it be possible to store in Time Capsule for the interim?
   
6. Will there be any limitation on file size/type on photos transferred? I know it is only the last 1000 but 1000 24 megapixel RAW files is a large amount of data.
   
7. Will it be possible to buy more than 1000 transfers?

If the iCloud works how I hope then it and an iPad will make an excellent additional back up solution whilst on long trips.

Thanks for your input.

As stated above, if you put it in your camera roll it gets pushed to the cloud. You can't pick folders.

If your computer is off then it will download them from the cloud when you turn on. Currently it's taking about 10 mins, but putting that down to Beta. It doesn't wake your machine.

It's your latest 1000 pics you've taken on your idevice. That's it. It's not 1000 transfers. Once you take your 1001st pic, the 1st you took gets bumped off the list.

If your computer is out of space it won't download them until it has space.

Can't answer the time capsule question properly but from what I see currently, nope.

I've not tried to put RAW pics in there, but if it's compatible with iOS, then should work

Photostream is not a backup of all your photos. Just the last 1000 you've taken on your idevice or put in the upload folder on your computer.

Edit - oh and currently you cannot delete anything from your photo stream

 

[fastuning]

will be cool if there a web where i can find a gallery of my photostream... like GALLERYME

 

[jason928]

So in iOS 5 with iCloud, if you take a picture it will go to both Camera Roll and photostream, is that right? Are they both pushed to the cloud if I am on WiFi?

That is a bit confusing. This seems to be unnecessary duplicate of all my photos by design. Also if I cannot delete photos from photostream, does that mean everything I took in the phone will be in the cloud and will be the "Truth"? That does not sound right as I usually takes multiple pictures in the same spot and only pick the best one.

Also does photostreams work only in Wifi or 3g as well? It will not be very useful if it is wifi only.

Thanks.

 

[Cyacene]

So in iOS 5 with iCloud, if you take a picture it will go to both Camera Roll and photostream, is that right? Are they both pushed to the cloud if I am on WiFi?

That is a bit confusing. This seems to be unnecessary duplicate of all my photos by design. Also if I cannot delete photos from photostream, does that mean everything I took in the phone will be in the cloud and will be the "Truth"? That does not sound right as I usually takes multiple pictures in the same spot and only pick the best one.

Also does photostreams work only in Wifi or 3g as well? It will not be very useful if it is wifi only.

Thanks.

If you take a picture while on 3G, your photos will not get uploaded until you connect to wifi.

Currently everything gets uploaded (although it seems to have missed a few of mine so far), so this means all your multiples get beamed away.

If you erase all the photos off your camera, you can still access them from the photostream link. I cannot tell if these photos are still taking up room on your device or not at this point.

 

[f4ff]

I am bit confused how it will work on PC, they say it will automatically push the new photos from your iphone to "my pictures" on your PC. But Do you need to do any setting or install some app on your PC to start using it.??

 

[csheath]

yes on windows at least you need the iCloud software which then allows you to select which folder the photostream is located in as well as a few other things like bookmark syncing

 

[Badbaw]

What about those of us who upload hundreds of pictures, and delete hundreds of those pictures, while editing the hundred we keep?

I do not want automatic upload of the one thousand pictures I upload at one time, especially in their RAW format, just so that it can re-sync to remove those pictures after I have deleted them. How the hell will this work?

In theory, it applies prominently to casuals.

 

[Cyacene]

Edits

So I have a photo that I took on my iPhone 4 and that can be accessed via the "camera roll", and this same photo is also showing up in my "Photo Stream".

1. I cropped the photo in my camera roll with the new built in iOS Photo editing functions, and the edits were NOT applied to the picture in the Photo Steam.

2. I edited a (different) photo directly in my Photo Stream and upon hitting save i could either "save photo to camera roll" or "cancel". Saving the photo to my camera roll did NOT overwright the original but created a second picture. This new photo, does NOT appear in my Photo Stream.

So in either case, there is no way to get the new picture into the Photo Stream. Hopefully this changes in the future.

 

[shandyman]

I am bit confused how it will work on PC, they say it will automatically push the new photos from your iphone to "my pictures" on your PC. But Do you need to do any setting or install some app on your PC to start using it.??

You need the iCloud Control Panel for Windows, it defaults putting a folder called Photostream into your My Pictures folder, which you can move in the Control Panel if you choose, in that photostream folder are 2 subfolders, My Photo Stream (which will have all the pics from your other devices) and Upload (where you put any photos you want to appear in your stream).

Annoyingly there is no way to delete photos from the stream (on Beta 1 the iPad had a delete button which was greyed out, but in Beta 2 this has gone.) If you delete them from the PC's photostream folder, it has no effect on the stream. Also it says it has your last 1,000 photos, but only 300 or so seem to appear when i've put a load in the upload folder on the PC.

 

[MacRumoren]

basically you can't delete photostream photos now, but can we at least copy it to Camera Roll?

 

[shandyman]

basically you can't delete photostream photos now, but can we at least copy it to Camera Roll?

Yes you can copy to camera roll.