Someone explain Photostream to me

[ra4oasis]

I get the basic idea of Photo Stream, a way to have a photo I just snapped show up on all my devices. But I just wiped and reloaded everything on my Macbook Air yesterday (not my primary machine, but still), and my Photo Stream shows only 144 photos in it. When I look at the Photo Stream on my iPhone 5, I see 922, and on my iPad 2, I see 201. Should I not see the same number of photos in the stream on all devices?

Also, is the stream still supposed to hold 1000 photos max? Or is there a one month limit. So confused...

 

[BaldiMac]

1000 photo max and one month limit for "My Photo Stream" photos stored in the cloud.

Each device will hold up to 1000 photos in "My Photo Stream" with no time limit. New devices will only be able to download what's in the cloud.

Shared Photo Streams can hold up to 5,000 photo with no time limits.

 

[white4s]

I believe it also stops & restarts from when you do backups

 

[ra4oasis]

1000 photo max and one month limit for "My Photo Stream" photos stored in the cloud.

Each device will hold up to 1000 photos in "My Photo Stream" with no time limit. New devices will only be able to download what's in the cloud.

Shared Photo Streams can hold up to 5,000 photo with no time limits.

Okay, thats sort of what I thought. I just guess I don't know why the Photo Stream shows a different number of photos on all three of my devices.

 

[BaldiMac]

I just guess I don't know why the Photo Stream shows a different number of photos on all three of my devices.

Probably because they all started downloading pictures from My Photo Stream at different times. The newer devices wouldn't get photos that were more than a month old when they started to sync.

 

[dhlizard]

In my experience with restores of content (photos), iClloud never fully restores all your Photostream photos

 

[BaldiMac]

In my experience with restores of content (photos), iClloud never fully restores all your Photostream photos

Again, only the last month of photos (or 1,000, whichever is smaller) are stored in the cloud, so only those photos would be downloaded to a new (or restored) device.

 

[mattopotamus]

photostream needs a lot of work. Really icloud needs to be able to backup photos like dropbox, box, google drive, or any other cloud competitor.

 

[cynics]

Photo stream is hit or miss for me especially on my AppleTV. Right now I have zero photos on my photo stream on any device I have (Mac, iPhone, iPad) yet still several hundred remain on my AppleTV (or the cloud if not stored locally).

Tried turning photo stream off and back on, resetting all my devices, restores, etc.

Going through and manually deleting them on a AppleTV would take way too long. I don't get it.

I never asked about this on this forum so if anyone has any ideas clue me in.

 

[Armen]

Photostream is so freakin' confusing. I wish Apple would let use browse the photos directly from icloud.com and let us delete or download the pictures we want.

 

[sunking101]

I switch it off as I'm quite able to sort my own photos out. I also want to keep different photos on different devices.
iCloud is good for backing up data, but a gimmick elsewhere IMO.