There are two major malfunctions here:
Photo Stream only syncs your last 1000 or 30 days of iOS images. One thousand sounds like a big number! But 30 days is nothing. It’s a crippling limitation. For a device you’ll carry around with you everywhere you go, the things you saw within the past few weeks only are pretty inconsequential. This isn’t true backup. It’s a sliver of your collection. It’s econo-backup. It’s lame.
And then there’s a nice, giant privacy concern: you can’t delete anything from your Photo Stream. You can deactivate the whole thing entirely, in which case you lose it all. But you can’t remove individual shots once they’re in the cloud — and synced to everything Apple you own. The possibilities for, say, some sort of indiscreet photo winding up someplace it shouldn’t be is amplified incredibly with this stupid design. It’s creepy — I don’t want Apple to tell me I can’t delete pictures I took myself. iCloud should be a safety net, not a cage.
We’ll have our full review of iCloud tomorrow.
MDolley
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 10:25 AMSkyDrive lets me delete photos I have backed up really easily.
I thought iCloud was the future of computing?
Susan
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 11:39 AMTry the help menu!
Or the first hit in Google!
Here’s how:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4890
Dave
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 11:52 AMYou can delete from the photo steam… kind of. If you go to iCloud.com and sign in you’ll see your name up top right. Click it. Then click Advanced from the drop down menu and click on Reset Photostream. Just for reference this doesn’t seem to delete already shared photos weirdly enough. you have to turn off and on photo stream on each device for them to clear out. Must be a local storage too.
MDolley
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:23 PMResetting Photo Stream is not the same as deleting individual photos (which seems to be the complaint)
boc
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:53 PMDid Apple make this themselves or did they buy out another company?
This is pretty piss poor.
Amused
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 8:00 PMPhotostream is:
TERRIBLE: Because you can have your photos synchronized effortlessly across multiple devices, with the ability to save those photos elsewhere within 30 days, AND the ability to delete them if required?
That’s terrible?
CREEPY: A strange comment to make considering it’s usually the user who actually adds the images to Photostream. And there’s always that delete option if you get freaked out by that stuff that you just put there on purpose…
Instantations
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:23 PM@Dave
I’ve tried that. Resetting the photo stream from iCloud.com does delete the pictures from the cloud, but NOT from the local Photostreams. If one of your devices has already downloaded local copies of the pictures, they stay there, whatever you do. Resetting the photo stream only prevents the pictures from further syncing to more devices.
Here’s how it works. You take a pictures on you iPhone, it syncs to the cloud. Your MacBook Pro is on. The picture is downloaded to your MBP. Your iMac is off, so it doesn’t get the picture yet. You reset Photostream. Once you turn on your iMac, the picture doesn’t sync to your iMac (since you’ve reset Photostream) but it does stay on the MacBook Pro.
@Amused
You do not add the images to Photostream on purpose, you can only turn Photostream on or off. Once you’ve turned it on, each and every picture you take ends up in it, leaving you no choice. How can this go without a delete option?
Tony
Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 7:50 PMiCloud and photostream suck, really. Me.com users were hoping that the Apple not-so fine hour won’t be repeating itself. I mean, can’t they just buy dropbox, re-brand it and and offer proper cloud — it’s that simple.
Sergey
Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 11:32 PMOnly 30 day is not a limitation. If you need picture you can resave it to any one folder you need. It is not good idea to keep your pictures in the stream.
As I understand the main idea for photos is not a storage but sharing between devises. It is temporary storage. 30 days is enough to make decision what to do with this picture. That is why you cannot delete pictures from stream. In addition those pictures even do not use iCloud space. I mean if you have your free 5GB you have even if last 1000 pictures also 5 gb.
Lisa Rudd
Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 1:49 AMI can’t even get it to sync anyway…all switched on, but photos taken on iPad not going to iPhone and vice versa…I set it doing some backup thingy (I’m new to all this) and it still going an hour later???? Really confused.