Photostream, Camera Roll and Usage

[jayes]

I thought I had a pretty good grip on the way Photostream worked, but got a surprise the other day when I checked my usage and saw that both Photostream and Camera Roll were taking up mulitple GB's of space. Camera Roll at 3.6 GB and Photostream at 2.0 GB. I know that Photostream is the conduit, but I thought it used the photo that was in Camera Roll. But it seems as if there are duplicates of most of my photos on my 16 GB phone. So my questsion.. once a photo has migrated to iphoto on my iMac via Photostream, is it safe (and wise) to just remove it? I always seem to have 1000 photos in my Photostream. As space is clearly at a premium on a 16GB iphone, should I be routinely clearing out the "stream" to free up space? Was wondering if I am missing something and there is some setting that will delete the photo from Photostream once it is uploaded to my computer.

 

[Nolander07]

Once the photos are in Photo stream, open iPhoto on your mac, and they will be in the Photo stream there too. From there, save them to iPhoto on your mac. Once they are actually saved into iPhoto you can delete them from Photo stream. Photo-stream is not really for saving pictures, it is mostly for transferring pictures between devices.
If you delete pics from photo stream on your mac, iPhone, etc., the pics will be deleted from Photo-stream on all devices.
I hope that helps and yes, the pics in Photo stream do take up memory.

 

[jayes]

Thanks Nolander for your reply. This has been a real eye opener. I still can't understand why Photostream needs to hold 1000 photos when it is only the channel by which your photos migrate to one's computer. Unless one is taking ten's of hundreds of photos a day and they are sitting there until one is on wifi. ????

I did as you suggested.. I went into iPhoto and looked at My Photostream under the WEB heading. ALL the photos in My Photostream were already in the Library section under Events, Places, etc. I did not have to save them. And I certainly had not done anything special to get them there. I did, however, have to save photos that others had shared with me. They did not appear to migrate by themselves.

I went so far as to start deleting the photos in My Photostream and have increased the free space on my iPhone. After deleting about 50 pics, photostream usage was down to 1.9 GB. I've a long way to go, but I was still a little leary about deleting photos so I took it slow. So what you're saying is I can chop away on the other 900 or so pics and free up that much more space on my phone. Very helpful information.

 

[Nolander07]

Yes, you can delete all the photos from photo stream as long as you are sure they are saved to your computer (or where ever you want to save them)- not that they show up in photo stream on your computer, but that they are actually in iPhoto (events, etc., like you said).
Just to be sure-delete a couple from photo stream, then check iPhoto to make sure they are actually saved somewhere.
The great thing about photo stream and iCloud is that I essentially never plug my iPhone to iPad into my computer anymore to sync everything.
Good luck and have fun.......

 

[jayes]

This is very helpful information. Just one more question. You say you don't hook your phone up any more to the computer. Do you just delete photostream as you take pics (because you know it just works)? My plan would be to keep photostream empty so as to free up as much space as possible on my phone. Is that what you do too?