Understand the limits of the Photo Stream and how to save images from it so they aren’t removed from your iPad or iPhone
Sometimes you may know that you had some images on your iPad or iPhone but suddenly you find that they’ve gone.
This happens to me when I drop some images into my Photo Stream on my Windows PC that I want to use on my iPad. I drop images into the Uploads folder on my PC and, via the iCloud, they are synced automatically to my iPad. I know the images got there safely – I put them there months ago and I know that I saw them on my iPad but suddenly today they aren’t there. Confusing? Happened to you? It probably has and here is the explanation as to why they disappear and how to stop them from doing so.
The issue is the Photo Stream. The photo stream on the iPad and iPhone only store the last one thousand images – if you shoot lots of images and, say have your iPhone and iPad synced then you’ll run out of space pretty quickly. When you do then images are knocked out of the Photo Stream to make room for more recent ones.
The issue doesn’t happen on your Mac or PC because they have plenty of space so photos in your Photo Stream folders there are always there – it is just a protection against junking up your iPhone or iPad with ‘stuff’.
So, what do you do when you want to keep some of the images from your Photo Stream permanently and you don’t want to lose them? The answer is to move them to an album or to your Camera Roll. The images in your camera roll and in albums are there to stay. And just to clarify, you don’t have to move images from the Photo stream that you captured with that device – because images you capture on the iPad for example are in the Camera Roll and stay there. The images you want to save are those that get synced to the iPad via iCloud from other devices such as your iPhone or PC or Mac – they are the ones that only hang around for a short time.
How to move images from your Photo Stream to an album
So, to move a lot of images to an album (an easy solution for lots of images that you want to save to somewhere that isolates them from all your other images), tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream.
You should now see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Then tap Edit.
In this mode you can now tap the images that you want to save – each of them should have a blue checkmark on them. Now tap Save and choose to Save to an Existing Album or Save to New Album.
I have an album for images I want to edit and play with on the iPad called Editable Pix so I typically tap that to select it. This lets me store those images so they are isolated from all the other images in my Camera Roll.
How to move images from your Photo Stream to your Camera Roll
It is also possible to save photos from the Photo Stream to the Camera Roll. The advantage of this is that they are in the Camera Roll itself and in some situations that might work best for you.
To do this, again tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream so you see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Again tap Edit. In this mode you can now tap the images that you want to save – each of them should have a blue checkmark on them. Now, tap the Share button in the top left of the screen:
And choose Save to Camera Roll. (It is very confusing that these two processes that really are so similar are handled so differently in iOS6).
How to save one image from your Photo Stream to your Camera Roll
Now, if you just want to save one image from the Photo Stream to the Camera Roll, tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream so you see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Tap the one image that you want to copy to the Camera Roll so it is showing full screen. Now tap the Send to button that is a box with an arrow coming out of it in the top right of the screen and choose Save to Camera Roll from the menu.
Now you will never again lose images off your iPhone or iPad that you really want to keep.
