Photo Stream: What Is It? How do I use it? Does it really work? How To / Review – iOS 5, 6, iCloud
Introduction
Photo Stream was added to iOS in version 5 and received some new features in version 6. In a nutshell, Photo Stream will push the photos you’ve taken on one Apple device (iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch) to your other Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac and Apple TV) via iCloud.
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Photo Stream How-to’s
(Selecting any of the following links will take you to that specific guide at iPad HQ)
How-to Set Up Photo Stream
• iPhone – Set up and view photos on Photo Stream – How-to
• iPad – Set up and view photos on Photo Stream – How-to
How-to save a photo(s) from Photo Stream to another iOS device
If you want to save any of the photos from Photo Stream (iCloud) onto another iOS device (locally) you have to save them manually.
• iPhone – Save photo(s) from Photo Stream to another device- How-to
• iPad – Save photo(s) from Photo Stream to another device – How-to
How-to Set up a Shared Photo Stream
• iPhone – Set up a shared Photo Stream – How-to
• iPad – Set up a Shared Photo Stream – How-to
How to add a photo to your shared Photo Stream
• iPhone – Add a photo to your shared Photo Stream – How-to
• iPad – Add a photo to your Shared Photo Stream – How-to
How to delete all photos from Photo Stream
• iCloud – Remove all photos from Photo Stream – How-to
Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments section on this post if you need help with Photo Stream.
Posted on October 26, 2011, in Apple, iCloud, iOS, Review and tagged Apple, Free, how-to, iOS, Review. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
As per FAQ, photo stream on the iDevices only stores an “optimized” resolution, not the full resolution.
Do you know if saving a photo stream photo to the Camera Roll saves the original resolution picture? Without this, saving on an iDevice does not make much sense.
Glad you pointed that out. I figured Apple was probably resizing photos but the FAQ confirms it. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4486
I just tested out you question since I did not have an answer. A test photo on my iPhone was 2.2 MB at actual size. I saved the same photo from iCloud onto my iPad. The size of it was 562k after the save. So the answer is no it does not save the original resolution. It’s not totally useless however because the compressed photo still looks great and it would be useful for setting up photo-albums. It would pretty much be just for viewing on the device (not for printing etc.), so in that regard I can see what you mean.
Thanks for testing it out. Unfortunately, I was hoping that was not the case since I was planning on using my iPad for photo editing and directly ftp’ing the photos to my NAS drive, thereby making it truly “PC-Free”. However, it seems I will now anyway have to go to the PC to edit the original resolution pictures, and hence this would not be very useful for that purpose. However, for getting an immediate feel for how the pictures look, I agree it is still a useful feature.
So, this also answers my lingering doubt over use of the $29 camera connection kit when PhotoStream does it for free, but now I know. To get original resolution pics to the iPad for editing, I would have to spend $29, deal with cables and still end up with duplicate photos (Photo Stream + Imported photos).
Yeah, I can see why you’re disappointed that would have been a good workflow.