You have 2 choices for Photostream for 2 people. You can either share an iCloud account (not recommended!) and not be able to use iMessage since you will both get each others messages. OR you can both have separate iCloud accounts, which means you will have separate photo streams. Now the tricky part. If you are using one PC to manage your photo stream you have 3 ways you can do it.
1) Sign in and out of iCloud whenever you want to change users (not recommended, since it could get VERY messy)
2) set up a second user account on the pc and set up your wires iCloud account on there....this is what I did. Now you can grab her pics and yours, but nothing else gets messed up.
3) set up another iCloud account strictly for photo stream. Set up your primary iCloud account as a secondary and have it sync everything else....set up the photo stream account as the primary and turn on only photo stream. Now you will have your cal and mail and all the other stuff on your main account, and just photo stream on the photo stream account. Now all of your pics will go to your iPhoto.
#3 is the best solution I've been able to come up with so far, but it's not quite optimal and I keep looking for something better. I guess this is it, though.
For instance, say I have things set up like this:
- iPhoto & iTunes on Mac Mini set up as our central media/data/htpc server with only one user account.
- Mom has an iPhone and an iTunes account set up to Mom@e-mail.com
- Dad has an iPhone and an iTunes account set up to Dad@e-mail.com
- There's a family Macbook Pro with individual accounts
- There's a family iPad
- There are multiple individual iPods
- There is a family AppleTV
- All are synced to the same iTunes and iPhoto library on the Mini
- Daughter will eventually have iOS device and iTunes account at Daughter@e-mail.com
Okay, so now I set things up as described in #3 above - create another iCloud account linked to
Family@e-mail.com and make that the primary iCloud account on Mom & Dad's iPhones for just Photostream, then they each have their individual IDs for everything else.
Now the problems/unknowns I see right off the top of my head:
- If someone wants to share a photo stream with Dad, can that be sent to Dad@e-mail.com, or does it have to be to Family@e-mail.com? That's a dealbreaker right there. For starters, none of our friends know Family@e-mail.com. Second, Dad doesn't want a bunch of BS Mom pictures and he also doesn't necessarily want pics from his friends showing up on Mom's device. Mom feels the same the other way.
- #1 goes double once Daughter gets into it. She is definitely not supposed to be privvy to Mom & Dad's photos and Mom & Dad certainly don't want to be swamped with pictures from all her little girl friends, but there's no way this house will not burn down if she doesn't get to use all the sweet iCloud features too.
- The iPad also needs to have some sort of photos shared to it, but we'd really like to limit that to things like the best photos from the last family trip or cute pics of the kids (stuff you show when visiting Grandma). Maybe this means the iPad gets its own iCloud ID - Family_iPad@e-mail.com? But then it's effectively out of the photostream, since the single iPhoto library (on one Mini user ID) can only push out a photostream to a single iCloud ID. I guess we just keep syncing albums to it?
- I thought I read somewhere that only the primary iCloud account can access the 5GB of online data. If so, now the whole family is effectively sharing one 5GB account. That's also a dealbreaker.
I'm pretty tired of Apple wedging people into their single person workflow. It's as if they think people don't use their devices in a family environment. These things all work great if each person has their own Mac, iPhone, and iPad, but that's only a fraction of real world use. It's annoying with iTunes, but at least that's manageable through syncing devices to certain playlists. This is just an outright mess.
This could be so awesome and so much simpler if they'd acknowledge that multiple people are going to live together and share their products. Why can't a single instance of iPhoto collect and share to multiple iCloud IDs and/or have multiple photostreams? Is it just that they're worried about people abusing multiple accounts to game the system and get more than 5GB of data for themselves? There has to be a better way to fight that without hobbling the functionality.
