A little confusion with Photostream in iCloud

[cosrocket]

I have a Mac running OS X Leopard with iPhoto 08. I know to use iCloud I have to upgrade to at least Lion, and if I want to use Photostream on my Mac upgrade iPhoto to iPhoto 11. My question is what photos can I actually use with photostream on the Mac. I know any photos I take with the iPhone or ipad will go in photostream, but what about the photos I already have in iphoto on my Mac, will they be in Photostream too? And what about photos from emails I save on my Mac, will they go into photostream?

Thanks for the help in advance.

 

[r0k]

I have a Mac running OS X Leopard with iPhoto 08. I know to use iCloud I have to upgrade to at least Lion, and if I want to use Photostream on my Mac upgrade iPhoto to iPhoto 11. My question is what photos can I actually use with photostream on the Mac. I know any photos I take with the iPhone or ipad will go in photostream, but what about the photos I already have in iphoto on my Mac, will they be in Photostream too? And what about photos from emails I save on my Mac, will they go into photostream?

Thanks for the help in advance.

I prefer not to have photos from my Mac pushed onto photostream because there are 300 Gig of them. If I did turn on pushing photos from my Mac, only new ones I either imported using image capture or imported from photostream would get pushed out again.

For instance, every month iPhoto auto-creates an event called something like "April 2013 photostream". The photos are in there and I can edit them if I want to. I would think (though I'm not sure) that the photos that just got copied into xxx 2013 photostream would get pushed out to my other devices because they "look new" to photostream on my Mac.

If you want all your photos to get pushed out onto photostream, you can try exporting them and then import them again (marking them as "new"). Again, I don't think pushing stuff from a Mac onto photostream is terribly useful. This is because before there was photostream I had Eyefi which pushed photos to a folder on my Mac over wifi from my Digicams and even my iPhone.

One thing I do like about photostream is that all my iThings get all the photos almost instantly. This means that if my iPhone and iPad mini are both on wifi, I can pass the iPad around for people to view photos within seconds after taking them.

One thing I don't like about photostream is it leads to bloat in my iPhoto Library after a while. What I do is I have "copy photos to iPhoto Library" when I import them turned off. Every now and then I drag photos to finder from iPhoto (exporting them strips meta data). I then import them again but after importing them I delete the old event which may have contained 500 MB of photos. This allows me to manage metadata for 300 GB of photos in a relatively small 11 GB iPhoto Library.