Any word on ios 7.0.4 addressing this issue?
I saw it includes updates to icloud key-chain, which was also starting to annoy me as I'd be playing a racing game and in the middle of a turn it would start skipping, then pause completely so icloud could ask me to verify my key-chain password, the same one I had verified minutes before.
But this photo stream thing has me so perplexed that I just shut it off on my phone, my tablet, and my wife's phone. For the past four months I've been finishing grad school while my wife was on maternity leave with our now four month old baby. I was home maybe 8-10 hours a day, and half of that was sleeping. But our phones and my tablet are on the same icloud account, so I relied on her pictures being pushed to my (our) photo stream to keep me in touch with my daughter's first months. Perfect example of what photo stream was designed for, right? But sometimes her camera roll would push to photo stream, and a lot of times it wouldn't, so I was still missing out.
I tried multiple solutions on several levels. I have turned photo stream off and on several times on all the connected devices and computers. I saved the photos off her phone, deleted them from the phone, then re-imported them to her camera roll. I reset her settings; I even backed up her phone to save the pictures, then did a system restore followed by restoring the back up to recover her camera roll. But her photos are still only randomly pushed from her camera roll to photo stream. There is no discernable pattern either. Her phone is on wifi and above 20% battery, but only 1 or 2 photos, if any, will push. If it is off wifi or below 20% battery, then is returned to wifi and charged, it will again push a few, if any at all.
It's the random selection that's the most irritating part. If nothing was pushed, we'd know what wasn't shared between our devices. But with a few here and a few there, it takes side by side comparisons to figure out what I was missing while I was away. Without reliability, this feature loses all the convenience it was designed for.
So my solution was to shut it off. We shut off photo stream on all devices, but kept shared photos open and set up a shared stream without any subscribers. Luckily, the collections tab in camera roll offers the ability to share a batch of photos with one touch (versus individually selecting each photo). Each day or two, my wife will go to her collections in camera roll and post the prior days' collections ("moments" as camera roll calls them) in their entirety. Occasionally camera roll even fails these posting attempts, but as this failure is by complete moments and not a partial failure, it's very easy to spot omissions and re-attempt the post (which frequently works).
Here's hoping 7.0.4 will address this problem.