Q: My iphone says my photo stream contains 235 photos.  Using the icloud control panel to download photos to my PC from the cloud I get only 86 photos.  Why?

Photo stream photos are only held in iCloud for 30 days, even though they remain on your devices until deleted.  When you first enable photo stream on your computer you will only get photos added in the last 30 days.  If the missing photos are older ones, that's probably the reason.

If you want to get the older photos on your computer, add them to a shared photo stream and invite yourself as a subscriber (see http://help.apple.com/icloud/#mmc0cd7e99).

nightdriver47 wrote:

 

Thanks randers4. I understand the cloud only keeps photos for 30 days.  However some of the 86 I got back are over 90 days old.  I should mention that I recently got a replacement phone and used iTunes to back up the old phone and then used same to put my contacts, email etc on the new phone.  Could this have been the source of the problem?

It should not have been possible to receive photo stream photos that old on a newly connected device unless they were added to photo stream much later.  iCloud keeps photos added in the last 30 days, regardless of when they were taken.  Perhaps the photos were somehow added to photo stream on your replacement phone.

Regardless of how this happened, the only way to get the missing photos on your PC is to either import them with your usb cable as described here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4083, or create a shared photo stream containing them which will sycn to your PC alongside your photo stream photos.