iCloud, your photos and "Photo Stream"

With iCloud and iOS 5, will come a new "Photo Stream" feature, where photos taken on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad will get pushed to the cloud, and then automatically sent to all your other devices*, including the Apple TV [if you have one]. All photos will be stored in the for 30 days, with the need to move them to your Mac or PC for permanent storage.

Above photos © Engadget

*It's a little unclear, but it looks like only the last 1,000 photos will be stored on any iDevice, which will be bad news for most iPhoneographers, who typically store several thousand photos on their iPhone's or iPad's.

Comments

[HarryMonmouth]

I have to say the keynote was very exciting for photographers. The camera bits and pieces have lodged in my memory more than anything else has.

[Dave Chapman]

We have two iPhones in our household and one iTunes account... I wonder how this will affect us? I don't think we want each others photos (I was taking photos of snails today!) in our camera rolls... hopefully there will be a pertinent tick box!
I think the volume button to take a photo will be huge for street photographers :)

[ClevelandRob]

We are in the same situation, Dave. I had the same concern, but the more I think about it, it might be nice to browse through photos my wife just took and mine on hers.

But I agree that there are some red flags as to how people with shared Apple IDs would handle all this.

[PositivePauly]

See, but the extra 5 gigs of space for hosting other photos - the last 1,000 are just saved automatically. Most hardcore iPhoneographers I know back up their photos to their computer and remove them from their phones every night. I'm one that leaves the photos on the phone. I'm thinking iCloud will just make this easier -- with the permanent storage being kept on the Mac/PC, but with some option for tapping into the 5 Gigs of space on iCloud, I imagine. I'm still not clear how that works.

As popular as iPhoneography is, and as much as it's helped Apple with iOS, I don't think Apple would make things worse for us iPhoneographers. Nor the developers. This will work as well as it should. I can't wait! It'll be great for users and developers alike.

[Steve]

I would say it is likely this feature can be turned off.

I see no reason to automatically have my photos synched to the cloud.

[Eric Schatz]

If you have more than one iphone in your network, maybe what you could do is give each one its own Apple Store ID?

[kinto]

@Steve.. completely agreed. i have zero desire for my data to be automatically uploaded in the background to "the cloud" (a.k.a. somebody else's hard drive) under the guise of convenience.

[Charles]

Like Pauly I'm quite excited about this. I'm perhaps in his description of hardcore iPhoneographers as I download, backup and remove images from my iPhone daily...BUT, if I'm on an extended shoot things can get dicey. If this photo cloud saves ful rez, a big big deal, then it will save me from bringing my laptop along or investing in wireless portable hard drives.

[Mr Timney]

I missed everything today from the WWCD, so like every other Apple "cloud" feature, will this be a free feature or a paid subscription? For if it's a pay features, I could careless.

Also any info on an iPhone 5 release, features & or release date ???

[RichardG]

Mr. Timney, the release date was given as "this fall." A beta release of iOS 5 has already gone out to developers, so the process seems pretty far along. But there's a lot to get right.

All the iCloud services announced yesterday will be free -- except the music service (iTunes Music Match, or something like that), which lets you access your whole music collection from the cloud for $25/year US.

The most expensive thing mentioned yesterday was OSX Lion, which will be out next month and just costs 29.95 USD. Apple clearly wants to move the whole iOS experience to the cloud, so they've pretty much baked it into the core processes of the new operating system.

I'm looking forward to having brand-new iPhone photos pop up right away on my iPad. I often need the bigger screen to decide which ones are really keepers.

[Mr Timney]

@RichardG That sounds interesting! Cheers