Apple’s Photo Stream Is Cool!

I admit to being skeptical when I first heard about Photo Stream from Apple. Why would I want to see all the photos from all my devices in one place? Our house has 2 iPhones, 2 MacBooks, and an iTouch. Just got back from a trip and have now realized how cool Photo Stream is.

Here’s how I set it up. I use Aperture on my Macbook at home and on the road, so I made this my Photo Stream home base. I then set up my iPhone’s Photo stream to our main iCloud account. I then set up my wife’s iPhone Photo Stream to the same iCloud account.

So here’s how it works. As were out and about snapping photos with our iPhones as soon as those phones hit a wifi area, say in a hotel or Starbucks the Photos will sync to the Photo Stream. So the photos I’ve taken show up on my wife’s Photo Stream on her phone and vice versa. Also, when I finally get around to downloading images from my regular camera into aperture, they will eventually show up into the photo stream, on all configured devices almost magically.

From what I can tell aperture will upload all photos that have been downloaded from a memory card even the bad ones and holds 1000 photos and keeps them for 30 days from the time of uploading, providing plenty of time to save them to folders or the camera roll on an iPhone or iPad. So it’s a good idea to go and edit out the blurry ones, which should be done anyways! Any connected device to the Photo Stream can also save images into device specific galleries before they leave the stream, which makes it easier to manage the photos as well

What I find helpful is that it easily places photos from multiple devices into one place. Anyone else used Photo Stream? Experiences?

Word of caution though when you have the Photo Stream turned on, on the iPhone it will automatically look for new photos when it finds a wifi signal, therefore this can become a batter issue if you have just downloaded 300 photos from your digital camera.