Shared photo streams question

[MonstaMash]

I thought the point of shared photo streams was to solve the following problem: a group of friends all take photos and want everyone's photos on all of their devices.

But with shared photo streams, you (the album starter) can only share albums, no one else can add to them?

So if a group of 6 people were trying to share photos between each other, it would require 6 different photo streams??

 

[0029937]

I've been searching all over for answers regarding this. It seems Apple just didn't really think this one through. Expect it to suck for a few weeks (probably months) before they do an update when they realize that for 1-2 people it's not so bad but any more than that and your Shared Photo Stream ends up being a confusing mess.

The concept is awesome, how they've implemented it is absolutely horrible. What they really need to do is merge 2 people's Photo Stream. Right now I have a separate one for pics I contribute to my girlfriend and then another one for her pics to me.

Play this scenario: I've created an album for my sister and one for my girlfriend. So for the name of the album I chose my name lets say. What appears now in the main Shared Photo Stream album? 2 separate albums both named Tom, both with the grey text below the name of the album that says "Shared by me". How stupid is it that I now have no idea which one is which. I can't tell which one is for my sister, which one is for my girlfriend without hitting the blue arrow on the right. My workaround: start naming the albums like this: Tom's pics for Susan, Tom's pics for Lucy for example.

I think the majority of people who have tried Shared Photo Stream haven't realized it's huge confusion because they haven't added enough people yet. Give it a few weeks, you'll have more people realize that it could have been implemented so much better.

 

[frunkis54]

you could always title it something else that would make it easy to know what it is GF's pics or family pics and so on.
just an idea

 

[0029937]

you could always title it something else that would make it easy to know what it is GF's pics or family pics and so on.
just an idea

Yes, that's where I described the naming pattern of "Tom's pics for Susan". That still doesn't fix the issue of on my phone right now, I have 2 people I'm sharing photo streams with and I have 4 albums! Add another 1-2 people to that you'll be at 6 or 8 albums. Just a mess to look at. They need to merge albums. If I sent a request to a friend to join my shared photo stream and then that friend sent me a request as well and we both accepted they should just join the albums so all our pics are in that one album. I'd much rather have that just to not clutter up the main Shared Photo Stream screen.

 

[diamond.g]

I thought the point of shared photo streams was to solve the following problem: a group of friends all take photos and want everyone's photos on all of their devices.

But with shared photo streams, you (the album starter) can only share albums, no one else can add to them?

So if a group of 6 people were trying to share photos between each other, it would require 6 different photo streams??

Yeah the uploading was the first thing that a bunch of fiends and I tried. Seems like that is a no go. Hopefully Apple will fix that in the next version of iOS.

 

[mms13]

Yeah, I think the way the photo streams work is really dumb. I was expecting it to be a Dropbox-like service where any of the people invited could add photos. But to do that you need to set up a stream for sending and one for receiving. Doesn't make sense.

 

[0029937]

Yeah the uploading was the first thing that a bunch of fiends and I tried. Seems like that is a no go. Hopefully Apple will fix that in the next version of iOS.

Funny because my sister said that on her old Blackberry you could do this (part of BBM I guess?). Can't believe Apple didn't think of this.

 

[Razeus]

yep. Same here. Yet another thing broken shipped by Apple on the world's "most advanced" operating system.

 

[mattopotamus]

Glad I am not the only one. Just went to set one up and it's not at all like they made it appear in the keynote. I was thinking I could basically create a new photo stream, add anyone with an iPhone to it, and takes pictures that would automatically generate for us all to see.