Delete single photos in photostream

And just one more thing,

From this page I linked to above http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html

it says

You can’t edit or delete photos from your Photo Stream. If you want to touch up a photo or keep a favorite shot permanently, simply save it to your Camera Roll. iCloud stores new photos for 30 days, so you have plenty of time to connect your iOS device to Wi-Fi and make sure you always have your most recent shots handy.

Its glaringly obvious Apple underestimated the need / desire to allow the user to delete images from the photo stream or choose whether particular images should enter Photo Stream or not there is no debate to be had on this

A summary of the issue is

1: In its present form PS is somewhat useful to lots of people

2: With the ability to selectively allow images in and out of PS its massively useful to many more people

Based on that from a marketing point of view Apple should add this feature in the meantime use PS if you can and don't if you can't

Shall we lock this thread now :-)

And people wonder why there are so many Apple haters out there, it is due to comments such as "you just don't get it". I am a long time Apple user and love their products, one reason why is their ability to make their end users happy and perform great customer service. I guarantee you Apple would never say to their customer you just don't get it. I am willing to bet photo stream will have a delete option in the near future as it is only logical, which is what Apple does very well. Please lock this thread, the fact is you cannot delete photo stream photo's and there are numerous end users requesting it. Why can't people just respect other's points of view? People come to these forums for help and education, not to read people post non helpful posts that add nothing to the discussion but derogation.

Something that has been completely overlooked in this quite long thread is that most people [i.e. those who do not spent time on tech support forums like this] have no idea what Photostream is or what is does and will only find out when something embarassing/sensitive/potential surprise gets seen by the wrong person. So all the debate about what Photostream actually is and what people want it to be is a bit moot in the real world of normal users.
In fact I didn't even know what Photostream was until I came to try and clear out my phone and came across another one of Apple's ideas of simplicity that sadly too makes things somewhat difficult. As as far as I was aware your phone simply backed up your data including your images in Photos to iCloud, not just the images in Photostream which will simply appear to be another album that duplicates, but doesn't quite match your Camera Roll for some reason. And working out how to remove images from Photostream was harder to do than learning Photoshop.

All I wanted to do was copy images to my hard drive and delete them from iPhone to make room for other data and keep things tidy. Despite being pretty good with computers and techy stuff in general, I still had to read manual/check forums...etc. to do this normally very simple task.

Even then what a faff. I use Lightroom, Bridge and Photoshop and have a simple and very efficient workflow when using any of my cameras. Not the case with an Apple device, I have to use the wretched iPhoto [gag!] and then I end up with my files in places I do not want them to be. So you then have to export from iPhoto to where you actually need your files to be, root around deep in subfolders and delete the iPhoto versions as I never keep data on my Mac HD. Complete PITA!

Apple's idea of file management is vaguely OK if you do not have much content, low expectations of what to then do with it or not care where anything is. Otherwise it's a lot of hard work and faffing around.

[posted from Sheffield!]

Well Imajez I'm glad I'm not on my own in Sheffield !!! :-)

The iPhoto file managment solution is nothing short of a joke and is the main reason I still cannot use a Mac full time. Trying to find files and move stuff around, clean it up etc is laughable but Appole just dont see this they are convinced they are right just like with Mobile Me etc

We live in hope Up the Owls :-)

This will be my last response to this thread, as people are justifiably getting annoyed with my argument with Tunderhill, and as he is incapable of understanding any ideas but his own, so assumes anyone who disagrees with him must misunderstand and keeps repeating himself.

I would like to consider two ideas: changes that are heterogeneous to the intention of a device or system vs. changes that are consistent with it, and another possibility for the delay in implementation of obvious features.

Tunderhill keeps saying that wanting to delete single files from PS is like trying to drive a nail with a cell phone. If that were true, no one would disagree with him, including the tech people responding here. That metaphor, which he doesn't understand, describes a change that is heterogeneous to the design of a system and is the point of the metaphor: at no point in the future will any cell phone ever be developed that can hammer nails. Why would anyone build such a thing? A heterogeneous change will never be implemented.

A change consistent with the intention of a system or device, however, could be implemented at some time in the future. Since Tunderhill also asserts that the ability to delete single files will probably be implemented at some time in the future, he clearly does not mean what he says by the use of that metaphor. What almost every user would like to do is manage their files individually. It doesn't matter if the system is designed for storage or to push files between devices -- that is still what we want to do. And, by the way, whether the system itself stores files or just pushes them between devices is irrelevant: it is still all about storage and user control, whether the storage is in the cloud or on the device (both in this case). This change is perfectly reasonable, and yes, will probably be implemented at some in the future. I hope by next week. It doesn't matter that we can work around it now (I have). The workaround is awkward and stupid. It is not what we expect from Apple products, which are supposed to be more intelligent that that.

I will say the PS concept itself is indeed very intelligent.

Now I have no idea how things are run internally at Apple, but I do know how other businesses are run. Most businesses are run on a model in which you have producers who develop and produce a company's product, marketing people who sell it, and administrators who have final say how oversee the process. In most businesses (that are run in a poor or mediocre fashion), administrators listen to marketers and are annoyed with the limitations imposed by producers, while producers are reasonable and intelligent people who want to put out a good product. The history of this relationship is found in Dilbert. Doesn't matter if the business is a school, publishing house, or tech firm. Things usually run this way.

So it's very possible that the developers at Apple had a whole host of features they wanted to roll out in version 1 but marketers or administrators didn't want to wait for them. If that's the case, then all the annoyed posts on this thread can be compiled by Apple developers to use to beat marketers over the head and say, "we told you so."

But I also know that Apple, at the very top, is run by developers, so may be working on a different model. I really don't know. Seems like a better run company in general, but I don't know what internal dynamics guide the development and release of a product.

Anyway, we have asked for this feature. Let's see how long it takes them to give it to us. I want to use it. I won't continue to use it for long until it's a bit more sensible. But, it is a new kind of thing, so I'm willing to give Apple a little time. They've served me as a customer very well in the past and have earned quite a bit of loyalty.

There's an underlying mentality in the world that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. That was designed for the mass population because if a majority of people want to believe that the sky is purple, then how can you go against the majority? However, it doesn't mean the sky is purple. What you are unfairly doing is responding to my posts when i am responding to individual concerns and NOT TO YOU. I don't care about you. I don't care what you have to say. You came out of nowhere to personally attack a knowledgable tech person who is trying to help others on this board. The "phone as a hammer" comment was not to you. It was an overarching mentality of people using products incorrectly because they don't know how it works. On the one hand, i have explained how it works. Not how you think it should work. On the other hand, i have explained workarounds to get around the apple TV issue and others. Finally, since this issue is really about how things are evolving (not how they are now), i tried to give some insight on why you should try and adapt to some of the functionality. This forum is not about you or your opinion. It's about helping people use their products better. If i told you 3 years ago that you should press on your computer screen to "click" on your monitor, nothing would happen and you would be complaining that your monitor doesn't work. Then you would be sitting here telling me that i'm an "idiot" because i am happy with touchable computer screens. That is not true. The iPad had not come out yet and so that comment would have been irrelevent. It's not how it works. Photo Stream is an end to end device sync service. Not web storage. As much as you want it to be web storage, it won't be. You can scream and make personal attacks all day, but that is not the product that apple put out and that is not the product that ALL TECH companies are changing to. EVERYONE is switching to end to end syncing because of the tremendous speeds that are now available for connectivity. This was always the intent of the internet and just like my analogy, at one point you needed an operator to direct your phone calls. Eventually you were able to simply dial the other person's phone directly. That is what is now happening with the internet. The "cloud" will be short lived. It will be automated and invisible and you will simply look at devices. Now here is the ultimate problem with this forum. Someone else will not comment that this thread is not about the future of the internet. But now i am specifically speaking to you. You don't know what's coming down the pipe. You don't know the trends. You are not running Apple or Google or Amazon or whoever. You can keep screaming that the sky is purple BUT the people in charge, even if they are the minority, know that it's blue. And so they will make small modifications, one at a time, until the late adopters finally understand. That's why technology evolves slowly. Too many people are lost on the transition. Please stop attacking me. Please stop whining. THERE WILL BE A DELETE INDIVIDUAL PHOTO ON PHOTOSTREAM FUNCTIONALITY, BUT...... IT'S NOT THERE NOW. So your only options are other services and workarounds. You stated your opinion. It was read by some people. And now they will do what is best for the company. Don't try to be knowledgable yet not helpful. You are interfering with the people on this thread who actually need help, and are not looking for a forum to voice their opinions. Go do that on some mac blog and not on a help thread.

I just lost a little bit of my life reading that. I'll never get it back.

Apologize for the next question: is this a support forum or a "amateur writers" blog? I mean, should we ask for support and propose new features, or we are here for other ethical and philosophical digressions?

I thought it was something like:

- "I'd like delete ora manage photos, could I?"

- "No, you can't"-

- "Ok, but maybe this thing will be usefull"-

- "Yes, ok. We will work on it"-

STOP

Ok, here's my two cents, this is just one humble person's opinion. I feel that photo stream, as well as iMessage, are both attempts at creating a continuous client across all of a given user's devices. With that being said, changes should be automatically pushed across all devices via iCloud, as is already done in iMessage. Think of it like this: if I send messages to someone through iMessage, and decide to delete messages or the entire conversation, this happens across all of my devices. The same can be said about IMAP email: if I read or delete a message, this is changed across all of my devices. This would seem to be the desired result. A good solution for the photo stream "problem" could be to allow each individual device an option whether to push "changes" to a photo (i.e. edits, crops, tags, and deletes) to the cloud, or to leave the original photo on the cloud and save any changes locally to the device. I am not saying that photo stream is terrible, quite to the contrary I greatly appreciate Apple's efforts towards creating a continuous client, however, I do feel like it could be made even better by tweaking it a bit more.

Cute anecdote:

My friend's 3 year old daughter grabbed her iPhone and snapped a photo of her while she was breastfeeding. LoL.

Definitely a photo you would want deleted from the PhotoStream.

The average consumer is going to be confounded as how to get that photo off of PhotoStream. I think you should at the very minimum be allowed to delete the local photo.

Great now I have three pics of my Johnson and a half naked girl in my POS PS....This *****! Useless..

.

And why do I have those on my iPhone? BECAUSE I can.

I wonder how many breakups and divorces this is going to cause.

Just need to add one more option “Delete” PLEASE.

THANKS!

go in to settings and turn of icloud and that will delete them all,rather all or nothing i suppose lol??

Thirteen pages of arguments, talks of flying trucks and diatribes from self-appointed Apple experts who feel the need to EXPLAIN the purpose of features ad nauseum (while probably sitting in their underwear in their parents' basements). All of this over a simple observation that it would be really nice to be able to delete photos from Photo Stream????

Really?

Apple why not add the simple option to not upload for 5 minutes! So I can take a few pictures i want to keep. I hate getting on my Apple tv 2 and seeing my feet or the ceiling fan! But I do like the majority all we need is a timer. Worst case scenario is the families that have children and do not really understand how this works and they updated to ios 5 and all are getting photo stream pics and then the 10 yr old kid sees their undressed parents! Aaaaah and who else knows what may stream to them! Just a thought.