When I first heard about iCloud’s photostreaming feature I was really hoping that I’d finally have a much better workflow for my photos than being tied to my iPhoto library that was getting much too big for my little macbook air’s little SSD. Sure enough, once I got my macbook air, 27-inch iMac, iPhone and iPad all on iCloud photos taken on my iPhone started magically showing up on all the other devices, just like Apple had promised. Yay! I started imagining that, with all devices being synced, I could just choose the best place to edit and organize my collection and the results would flow across to all the other devices. Well, the images flowed okay.

I started with an image of a restaurant menu from a favorite sushi place using my iPhone’s HD setting, which meant that the iPhone produced two images automatically. Then once I had the images on my iPad I decided to rotate it so that the words were in proper orientation. I did it to both versions of the image. Okay. Now out of the four images I wanted to keep one and toss the other three, but there was no delete option for any of the four images hosted on the photostream. Um… yeah, not good.

Getting images effortlessly flowing from camera (phone) to any connected device is good, not being able to toss any image posted in the photostream is completely flawed. I come from the school where one might easily take 300 images to come up with three decent ones. Granted I’ve been know to post 100 of the 300 images on my flickr photostream but even then I’m deciding what images to post and which ones to toss. It just seemed inconceivable that one is forced to keep any image that gets on one’s iCloud photostream and the only way to pull one down is the pull all of them down (AKA disable photostream) or to wait for the undesired image to be the 1001st image. What?

Then, when I was experimenting with the iCloud photostream I made an event folder in iPhoto and added some images off of the stream and now the name of my stream seems to be connected to this event folder. Ugh. I’m afraid to add any of my pre-stream images from my iphoto library to the stream. At the moment it seems to distinguish between photos saved in the photostream and photos saved locally (on the “camera roll” on the iDevice), but does that mean the same images in both places are being saved twice. And when I organize my photos on my macs in folders (by events), will that organization get lost in the stream if I drop the photos back into the stream. The lack of controls makes me wonder. I mean, I wonder if the only way to organize my photos and share the organization back to my iPad and iPhone is to hook the devices back to a host Mac. Ugh. This is definitely a version 1.0 product.

I was able to find several video tutorials on YouTube about how to “delete photos” from photostream (one example listed below), but they were all about temporarily disabling photostream on all devices, then deleting all photos on the photostream and resuming using photostream… Not the workflow that i’m looking for. Damn.

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