I just got back from a bachelorette party in Puerto Rico with a dozen friends.
We spent the weekend hanging on the beach, dining out, and checking out the nightlife scene in San Juan.
Of course, we all took a ton of photos.
No one bothered to bring a camera — every one of us has an iPhone, and most of us use it as our primary camera these days since it takes great pictures and is convenient to carry around.
Most of us also share the occasional photo on Facebook and Instagram.
But when it came to sharing all of our weekend photos with each other — the ones we wanted each other to see, but not the rest of the world — we found that there wasn't an easy way to do so.
Apple's Photo Stream service should be the perfect solution to this problem. Unfortunately, it has a fatal error. It turns out that the iPhone's Photo Stream only lets a single user add photos to a stream.
Photo Stream, if you've never used it, allows users to share photos through Apple's iCloud. So, I can create an album called "Puerto Rico," throw 30 photos in it, then share it with a dozen friends. Wirelessly, they get access to those 30 photos.
Ideally, once I create "Puerto Rico," my friends should be able to toss their photos into the album, creating one super album of all the photos.
Instead, we had to designate an official weekend "Photo Stream chair." We all sent her our photos, which she then had to save to her phone and add to the stream.
I won't say that the extra step put a dent in the weekend fun. (Mostly because I wasn't the Photo Stream chair.)
But it would have definitely saved some time and hassle if we had all been able to upload our photos into a single stream at the same time.
I don't cover tech, but our tech people tell me Apple is getting ready to tweak the iPhone's software. Hopefully they tweak Photo Streaming. It's a very good idea, that could be great, if Apple would just make one small change.
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