My iCloud account is already at data capacity (with a paid addon at that) with my iPhone and iPad backups. It's also a huge pain waiting for a million photos to sync when I want just this one. I'm also not happy with the privacy aspects of Photostream if I've taken private photos.
I mean, it works. But it's not elegant nor efficient. The Dropbox method sucks too. I often don't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...
So the shared photo streams are effectively free photo album storage you can keep private or share with friends.
It also doesn't wait for a million photos to sync. It syncs the most recent one(s) you just took. It's hard to imagine more elegant or efficient than "it just happens without you doing anything".
It sounds like you're not very familiar with how Photostream really works. That's not unusual, a lot of my people I know complain about things that it turns out Photostream supports because Apple never really pushed or promoted it.
> I often don't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...
You're in luck; iOS has a switch to turn off 3G data and become a dumb phone.
If you're in the mood for the dumb phone style manual management instead of an automatic photo stream , there are several really great apps for popping single photos over or sharing the clipboard. I personally use a clipboard app that I can "copy" a photo on the iOS device and on my Mac just "paste" it somewhere. That one works over ad-hoc WiFi so doesn't need a WiFi base. Others work over bluetooth.
I stand corrected on the Photo stream data thing. My experience with it is not that it syncs the recent ones first. My experience is they pop in randomly, then it stalls for half an hour for no reason. Maybe it's gotten better recently.
It's still ridiculous that the answer to "I want to send this thing between these two devices in front of me" is "I have to send every photo I take to a server owned by a company somewhere".
Clearly Apple agrees, or they wouldn't have created AirDrop in the first place!
> I personally use a clipboard app that I can "copy" a photo on the iOS device and on my Mac just "paste" it somewhere. That one works over ad-hoc WiFi so doesn't need a WiFi base. Others work over bluetooth.
I mean, it works. But it's not elegant nor efficient. The Dropbox method sucks too. I often don't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...