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Note: Most of this information is no longer valid since, as always, technology changes rapidly, and the issue people had with deleting has now been changed.

There are a lot of questions about the Photo Stream, and I agree the Photo Stream does seem a little weird. The Photo Stream is intended for use in a manner we are accustomed to, but it has been wrapped in a new package. I am a photographer, and next to my DSLR, I choose my iPhone as my point and shoot. Like my DSLR the photo stream is my memory card. After I finish a shoot, I upload my photographs to my library, and clear my card for the next shoot. I will cover more about how I use the Photo Stream, as I believe it was intended later, and why a delete really is not a good option.

Photos in the Photo Stream are available to all devices. The Photo Stream is meant to be, well, a stream. The stream ensures that all devices can have access to recent photographs taken on a mobile device, or added to the stream from a library. The stream is not meant to be an online gallery. MobileMe had a photo gallery, but the MobileMe Gallery will be removed June of this year, 2012. The MobileMe Gallery never took off, probably because Flickr seemed to be a more popular online photography sharing site. Flickr is available for all devices, and is also accessible from Apple TV. Other photo sharing websites are available for various purposes such as sharing, selling, and more.

Many users have realized the problems with using the stream for photo management. Include is the more popular gripe, the inability to remove photographs from the stream. The Photo Stream is an initial container for holding photographs much like a memory card. For the most part, I ignore the stream, I will explain why later. I too have a feature I would like added to the Photo Stream, but my desired feature is a matter of convenience and does not interrupt my workflow. My suggested enhancement would be to arrange the Photo stream so the most recent photo is first at the top of the stream. I am certain additional features will be added to the stream in the future as photo management is enhanced on mobile devices. For the users that want to delete, delete is not an option. I would not expect to see delete, at least not at this point. In my opinion delete is not a needed function. Delete is actually a detriment for the Photo Stream. I will also explain why later as I cover my workflow.

The Photo Stream keeps photographs for 30 days, or up to 1,000 pictures, etc. All devices have access to the stream. You can pluck photographs from the stream to save to any device. I take photographs with my iPhone all the time, and not just for keep sakes or artistic purposes. Looking over my stream, I have a lot of photographs I do not want to keep. I have accidental photographs. I have photographs I took for SMS messages, and Facebook. I even have a couple photos of gift ideas. As a quick aside, since the holidays are here, taking pictures of gift ideas is quite helpful. As far as photographs go, I do not want or need to keep any of these random photographs in the future. This is the point in which most people want to be able to delete photos from the stream, and the reason why I say I ignore the stream. There are many different ways to use the stream as I believe it was intended, a memory card. Fortunately, photographs in this memory card cannot be accidentally deleted. What makes the stream so great, is that the photographs we take are not initially saved to the device. This is great because I do not want to have to delete photographs that I do not want to keep. I find it much easier to go through my library when I have photographs I want to keep, and add them to my device. Nobody should want junk photographs to take up precious iPhone memory. After all, if you need a junk photograph for more than 30 days, you may want to consider adding it to your library. For photographs that we want to keep there are a few options. I may not think of all of the ways to use the stream, but I will cover those that I do know and use.

There are several options. I will start with mobile devices since mobile is the most common use for the stream. In my Apple device collection, I have a Macbook Pro, an iPad, an iPhone and an Apple TVs. Okay, I do have other Apple devices, but let’s not go there. All four of these devices have access to the stream. I do not use my mobile devices for managing my photographs, but if I were, I would only pick good photographs from the stream to add to my device. Although the option to push photographs to the stream, I do not have a lot of reasons to use it unless I find something in my main library that I want to push to my devices to store, but most of that is taken care of by sync. I will cover how I manage the stream later.

I do take some photographs on my iPhone that I want to keep. The photographs I want to keep I pluck from the stream and add them to the device. Keep in mind, I do not want all photographs in the stream, and I also do not want stream photographs hogging up my device memory. For photo sharing and bulk storage I use SmugMug. I also have a Flickr account, but most of my photo sharing for friends and family is on Facebook.The purpose for sharing is dependent upon the reason I want to share the photograph. When I am ready to add photographs to my local device to keep and manage I would do the following:

1. Launch the ‘Photos’ app on my iPhone or iPad.
2. Choose ‘Photo Stream’ from the top option menu.
3. Click the forward arrow or share arrow, which we Mac users should be familiar with. (Optionally, you can choose a single photo from the stream and click the arrow to perform the same actions.)

4. Tap each photograph I want to keep, or to perform some other action.
5. Then choose one of the actions from the menu.

Options
1. Share: Share photographs, by printing them to my AirPrint enabled printer, Email the photographs, or send the photo as a SMS message.

2. Copy: As with photos from an album, images can be copied from the stream and pasted to other applications where photos can be edited, added to blogs, inserted into email, and many, many other things.

3. Save: Save will save the photograph to the device in the default camera roll.

4. Add To…: Add to… will provide the option to create a new library to store the photographs on the local device.

Now that the photographs have been plucked from the stream and organized locally, you can use them for any purpose whatsoever. As far as the photographs in the stream, just ignore them. If you need the photograph again for any reason, say you accidentaly deleted a photograph from a library, you should have at time download it again. In any case, the locally stored photos are on the device and can be used just as they have been used in the past.

The above workflow is great for users that only use the iPhone or iPad, or mobile devices. I have a MacBook Pro, as well. There are photographs and libraries that I want to have on my mobile devices, and there are photographs that I do not want. I have more photographs than can fit on any one device. I use my My MacBook Pro like I use the stream. After I do a shoot with my DSLR, I upload photographs from the memory card to the Aperture library as locally referenced files. When I am done editing and uploading photographs to my website, I archive the photographs to DVD, and then I migrate the images to a large network storage device. I do the same thing for the stream. For the stream, photographs I take on the iPhone or iPad are instantly available on my MacBook Pro through iPhoto and Aperture. I use Aperture for all of my photo management, but Aperture, and iPhoto both have the option to automatically pull and push photographs to and from the stream. As I mentioned before, there are not a lot of reasons to add photographs all of the photos from the stream to the library. I do not want to manage photographs in the stream, and I really do not want to manage them locally either, unless I specifically have photographs I want to import.

I will not go into a lot of depth on all of the features available through iPhoto and Aperture. These two programs work with iTunes. If anybody wants to keep all of the photos from the stream and store them on their device, they can auto import from the stream, and set up syncing to those photos through iTunes. Since a lot of the photographs tend to be junk, I do not suggest this workflow. Just grab the good photos when you want them, and let the other junk photos disappear automatically. Work with the photos you want in iPhoto and Aperture, edit, crop, tag, add places, faces, then share them, or send them back to the device.