Does photostream suck memory on the iPhone?

iCloud pushes all your Photo Stream photos to your devices and computers, and manages them efficiently, so you don’t run out of storage space.

Your iOS devices keep a rolling collection of your last 1000 photos in the Photo Stream album. From there, you can browse your recent photos or move the ones you like into another album to keep them on your device forever.

Since your Mac and PC have more storage than your iOS devices, they automatically download and keep every photo from your Photo Stream by default.

iCloud: Photo Stream FAQ

Yes, it does take up capacity. The Photo Stream version will be somewhat lower quality than the original in Camera Roll so you should import your photos to your computer, then periodically delete them from Camera Roll and/or Photo Stream to save space.

That's good to know. What about when you receive and accept invitations to photo streams from other users? Does that take up room on you device and utilise storage on you iCloud account? Thanks in advance.

All photos on your phone use room on your phone, whether they are photo stream, shared photo stream, camera tool or photo library photos. No photo stream photos use storage in your iCloud account, shared or otherwise.

What an interesting thing to know, that Photo Stream photos are of a slightly lower quality. This might affect my planned strategy to delete / ignore my Camera Roll photos so that I can just concern myself with what's in the Photo Stream > then deciding what I want to delete outright, download to my computer, or upload on Flickr.

Would love to hear from randers4 and others how they manage their photos efficiently so that they're not doubling the work.

Thanks!

Yes, photo stream photos uses your device memory. Photo stream photos are "device optimized" copies of the photos in your camera roll. If you want to conserve memory, save the photo stream photos to the camera roll on the device where they are not already in the camera roll, then delete the photo stream copy. Don't delete the full resolution camera roll photos until you have imported copies to your computer (Import photos and videos from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to your Mac or Windows PC).

Fascinating. So it seems I'm in a little bit of a bind. I would like to use Flickr to share photos with my friends and was hoping that the Photo Stream would make it easy for me to upload photos directly from my iPad or iPhone using the Flickr app. Problem is that I take most of my photos with my iPhone but do not have enough memory to update my OS to IOS 8, which is required to install the Flickr app. So I was hoping to use my iPad's Photo Stream to share and order prints but if the quality is diminished, maybe that's not such a good idea. Or is it the case that the quality is not really so diminished for a non-pro like me. Thanks for your advice!

FYI, you only need about 1.5GB of free space to update to iOS 8 using iTunes instead of updating over the air. Another option is to remove data that can easily be synced back. For example, if you have lots of music on your phone you can delete all your music, then sync it back after updating.

Oh, so is it the case that the memory load (requirements) pertain just to the update itself and when the update is done, the memory load is no longer relevant (that is, no longer taking up space on my phone)?

Correct. Also, the requirements are much higher when you update over the air because the device has to have room to download and expand the update, then use cache memory to move things around as it is installed. If you use iTunes, your hard drive space is used for much of this.

You rock, randers4. Thank you so much for your speedy and clear answers.

You're welcome. Good luck!