my photo stream is not loading all photos

Is photostream enabled in iCloud preferences?

Do you have it enabled in iPhoto?

Make sure that the photos taken with your iPhone or iPad has been uploaded to PhotoStream. Sometimes, I don't know why, let's say I take 14 photos of a party. When I get home I leave my iPhone on WiFi to sync all the photos. And when I wake up, I see that 12 photos are in PhotoStream and 14 in my iPhone...

Make sure that all the photos you want are in PhotoStream.

I just recently started using photostream. Works great, but still learning.

Check the date of those photos not downloading to the Mac. It will not download photos over 30 days old.

glenn, then why does iphoto on a mac have a selection option of "last 12 months"? it should say photos downloaded in last 12 months. either way this begs a different question. what happens in my situation:

purchased first iphone december 2011. awesome. buy first ipad february 2012. awesome. now i am a mac fan. bought first macbook air june 2012. now have photos on iphone and ipad that sync to windows pc but not to iphoto on new mac. now you may say to do the backup to pc like everyone else says. that is fine and all but when you follow the file path in the pc you cant find a folder for the photos. folder for music, videos, downloads is all there but no folder for photos.

so i am afraid to do the backup and lose all my photos. if your answer is buy a external drive, dont worry about telling me. photostream should work as advertised. i should have all my photos synced on all devices automatically unless there are memory restrictions. apple has not addressed this. i have hundreds of photos that are not syncing as should.

The last 12 months in iPhoto shows photos actually in iPhoto for that time period. It's more of a quick search feature (smart album). PhotoStream and iPhoto are 2 different things. If PhotoStream is enabled on the Mac as well as other devices, any new photos downloaded on one device will upload that photo to photostream and the other devices will download the photos from photostream to that device. Of course, the preferences have to be set to do this automatically.

PhotoStream is only suppose to hold the photos for 30 days to give all devices to be powered on and download. It's not meant to be a long term storage. It is to allow devices to share photos. If you want to store the photos, they need to be put in the iPhoto library or iPad photo library. If the computer is set to automatically download new photos in PhotoStream to iPhoto, then it should show the photos in iPhoto's Library once downloaded as well as in photostream. Once a photo is downloaded to all devices, you can delete the photo from photostream and it will not delete them from the devices since the devices will now contain it in their library.

I said I recently started using it and I'm not an expert on it. You can read some facts here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4486

I really don't fully understand your main question. How are the photos getting to the PC, iPad, and iPhone? Are they syncing with something else such as iTunes?

Music/Videos is totally different from PhotoStream. How are you syncing those? iCloud does not sync music.

You might be better posting a new question for exactly what you are trying to do. If they concern different topics, then maybe a question for each.