This is somewhat confusing to me Apple needs to revist this and simplify or better explain the way these processes work.
From what I gather if I have photo A on my iPhone and I sync it [my iPhone] to my iTunes, Photo A will now appear in iTunes [Photos Tab] and I can now safely delete the picture from my Camera Roll. If I then take a Photo B and C with my iPhone and sync to iTunes again then iTunes now has Photos A-B-C and my iPhone's Camera Roll will still ONLY have Photos B and C.
Right?!
I agree that it is confusing. I'd go further and say that it is a unintuitive, poorly documented, confusing mess. It was quite a bit that way before Photo Stream and worse now.
Your statement above is incorrect in that iTunes is not used to move photos from the phone to the computer and they do not display in iTunes. It is correct insofar as you can move photo A to the computer, delete it from the Camera Roll, take photos B & C, move them to the computer and if desired not delete them from the phone. That would leave B & C in the Camera Roll and all 3 on the computer.
If you later decide you want to put photo A back onto the phone (but in a separate album from the Camera Roll, that is where an iTunes sync comes into use.
First thing to understand -- using iTunes to sync photos is a
one way transfer: from the computer to the phone. You can use it to add any photos you want to your phone, not just photos that originally came from the phone. You select those pictures via settings on the iTunes photos tab. The pictures themselves do not display there but you select folders or albums to be synced. The pictures synced to the phone will not be shown as part of the Camera Roll -- they are displayed as separate albums.
Second: To move photos from the phone to the computer you use one of the methods described in
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4083
One way to use this (and to think of it) is to use the Camera Roll as your "unprocessed" photos. I periodically import all of my Camera Roll photos to my computer via USB and delete all of the Camera Roll from the phone. Deleting them from the phone's Camera Roll reduces storage and helps me keep track of which ones I have "processed."
I then arrange them in subfolders or albums on the computer. As part of the arranging process I am deciding how I want them organized on the computer and also which ones I want to have on the phone and how I want them organized there. I tend to keep most of the pictures on the computer with a few of them both on the computer and the phone. I then use iTunes to sync selected folders/albums back to the phone. This allows me to reduce the storage on the phone to just those pictures I really want on the phone, have them organized the way I want in both places, and maybe most importantly have all of them on the computer and allows me to include them in my normal computer backup process. Online forums are full of horror stories of photos lost due to all kinds of reasons.
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... it looks like deleting my camera roll probably won't do much, since it's not like those photos exist on the phone twice, both in the camera roll and then synced back in the All Photos section, which I wasn't sure about. Therefore, if I delete the camera roll, it would be empty, but all those same photos would just sync back from iTunes, right?
Oh well - I'll probably just get in the habit of sorting through my photos and not syncing all of them all the time. Thanks for your help though
I'm not sure that Camera Roll photos and the same photo synced back from the computer do not duplicate space. I suspect they do. I know that Camera Roll and Photo Stream don't but photos synced back from the computer can be from the phone or any other original source and even if they were originally from the phone, they may have been edited while on the computer. There could be a comparison process when they sync back but I doubt it. Again -- a suspicion but not a fact.
Also, it is totally under your control which photos sync back via iTunes. You don't need to have a 100% match between photos on your computer and your phone.
