Photo Stream - The details?

[Piggie]

Just watching Steve Jobs explaining Photo Stream and I'm wondering if I understand it correctly.

He basically said, you take photo's on your iPhone and right away these photo's are beamed to the cloud and downloaded onto your iPad and iMac.

He did not say, you would be able to connect to the cloud when you get home and using your iMac or iPad you can stream the photo's and browse them in the cloud, he said, and I quote his words:

"It will be automatically uploaded to the cloud, where it's stored and automatically downloaded to all my other devices"

I'm on holiday, and take a few hundred photo's, and when I get home, these photo's are already downloaded onto my iPad, which will be on standby but still on, and an iMac which I assume will start downloading as soon as it boots up.

The same goes, I suppose for your iMac, you get a load of new photo's on your iMac and they all get sent automatically to your iPhone and iPad.

Now, perhaps it's just me, but can't you see a glaring problem with this happening, with hundreds of photo's being copied across all devices automatically?

On a full computer such as an iMac it's no problem, as you will have a hard drive with a lot of potential storage. But on the small memory portable devices?

 

[radiogoober]

Just watching Steve Jobs explaining Photo Stream and I'm wondering if I understand it correctly.

He basically said, you take photo's on your iPhone and right away these photo's are beamed to the cloud and downloaded onto your iPad and iMac.

He did not say, you would be able to connect to the cloud when you get home and using your iMac or iPad you can stream the photo's and browse them in the cloud, he said, and I quote his words:

"It will be automatically uploaded to the cloud, where it's stored and automatically downloaded to all my other devices"

I'm on holiday, and take a few hundred photo's, and when I get home, these photo's are already downloaded onto my iPad, which will be on standby but still on, and an iMac which I assume will start downloading as soon as it boots up.

The same goes, I suppose for your iMac, you get a load of new photo's on your iMac and they all get sent automatically to your iPhone and iPad.

Now, perhaps it's just me, but can't you see a glaring problem with this happening, with hundreds of photo's being copied across all devices automatically?

On a full computer such as an iMac it's no problem, as you will have a hard drive with a lot of potential storage. But on the small memory portable devices?

Yes, that would be a problem, except that Apple already accounted for this. They limit the number of photos that are kept in your iPad/iPhone/iPod PhotoStream to the 1000 most recent photos. The numbers are unlimited on your Mac. Even 1,000 seems like a lot; it would be nice to have a setting to limit it to 250, 500, or 1000..... The other option is to just turn PhotoStream off.

Interestingly, in iOS 5.0 beta 1, there is no method to save a photo from your PhotoStream to your picture roll. I filed the bug already.

 

[Piggie]

Any chance Apple might release something that would allow a Camera maker to incorporate this into their compact camera?

Lets be honest, this is a superb addition, but who wants to use their iPhone as their camera all the time?

 

[fertilized-egg]

Any chance Apple might release something that would allow a Camera maker to incorporate this into their compact camera?

Lets be honest, this is a superb addition, but who wants to use their iPhone as their camera all the time?

That would indeed be very nice. But I don't see it happen anytime soon unfortunately.

For now I'm happy that my workflow will become much more simple. I use the camera connection kit on my iPad to edit and upload pics to my Flickr and then backup the content to my computer. With the Photo Stream the whole process will become automatic.

 

[h00ligan]

So if I have 500 photos in my photo stream, on the iPad for a week. That weekend I decide to be rid of 250 of them as I have culled, do those changes get pushed to my iPhone?

 

[spammerhamster]

Any chance Apple might release something that would allow a Camera maker to incorporate this into their compact camera?

Lets be honest, this is a superb addition, but who wants to use their iPhone as their camera all the time?

Already possible. Even before iOS5. Look into eye-fi. It's an sd Card which wirelessly transfers your pics into your idevice.

With ios5, it'd automatically get into icloud.

 

[blewyn]

And if I dump 16megapixel photos to my IPad with the camera connection kit from my Nikon D5100, do the photos uploaded to the cloud retain the full resolution, or do they get "optimised" ? What downloads to my mac and other iOS devices - full detail copies, or reduced-resolution 'optimised' copies ?

 

[h00ligan]

And if I dump 16megapixel photos to my IPad with the camera connection kit from my Nikon D5100, do the photos uploaded to the cloud retain the full resolution, or do they get "optimised" ? What downloads to my mac and other iOS devices - full detail copies, or reduced-resolution 'optimised' copies ?

and to piggyback that, does it only take jpg?