This is the single biggest technology related point of pain in my life, as well as the lives of many people I know.
Snapjoy looked like it was on track to fix the problem, then Dropbox acquired it and appears to be doing something...
But it really shocks me to see Apple fail to address these core problems in update after update.
The worst part is that if you have a photo in the photo stream and try to import photos from the phone into iPhoto, it warns that the photo has already been copied. Then if you delete it from the phone it's still not in iPhoto, and photos in the photo stream get deleted after a month or two. I estimate that I've lost a few hundred photos due to this boneheaded design.
Picasa comes close but is useless when it comes to intelligently syncing a canonical "cloud" copy of each photo to a variety of devices linked to the account.
> Picasa comes close but is useless when it comes to intelligently syncing a canonical "cloud" copy of each photo to a variety of devices linked to the account.
This might just be my device experience, but with automatic upload on, this is a non-issue for me; pictures taken on an Android device or uploaded to Picasa are available everywhere my Google account is.
Albums that originate on one machine are different from albums that originate on another machine. One must decide to manually sync albums, but the canonical copy of a photo lives on only one of the computers in question, not in the cloud.
This poses problems for creating albums from photos whose canonical copy lives on different machines. One must first sync, then duplicate items that did not originate on the local computer.
It sounds like you (and possibly the author of the article) turned off the iPhoto option to automatically import photo stream images to your library. See:
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2712
Other than videos not being included (yes, that's annoying), it does exactly what I need. Am I missing some other aspect?
Suppose you have two computers, each with its own iPhoto library. Picasa does not unify all the photos into one repository and allow you to use them (for edits, or for composition into specialized collections of photos for sharing).
Also, it does not solve the problem of the iPhoto library filling up most of the hard drive and the user still wanting to seamlessly use the photos as described above.
Nope. All photos (and screenshots) are added to iPhoto automatically as long as iPhoto is actually running, even if the iPhone is on wifi in a different country, meaning its not just a local sync. Only videos require physical cable.
Snapjoy looked like it was on track to fix the problem, then Dropbox acquired it and appears to be doing something...
But it really shocks me to see Apple fail to address these core problems in update after update.
The worst part is that if you have a photo in the photo stream and try to import photos from the phone into iPhoto, it warns that the photo has already been copied. Then if you delete it from the phone it's still not in iPhoto, and photos in the photo stream get deleted after a month or two. I estimate that I've lost a few hundred photos due to this boneheaded design.
Picasa comes close but is useless when it comes to intelligently syncing a canonical "cloud" copy of each photo to a variety of devices linked to the account.