Why I don’t like Apple’s Photostream

Yesterday was my first experience with Apple’s Iphone sharing capabilities.  The objective sounded quite simple.  Download a group of photos to a computer.  That simplicity stops at the word “simple.”

Working with a person over the phone and having another iphone in my hand I attempted to share out the pictures.  On my Android phone when I click share I have probably 20 different options to share.  On the Iphone, not so many.  Major ones like dropbox are completely missing.

I tried to share via email and it would only let us do 1 picture at a time.  That’s a useless tool for this objective.  The next thing we tried was to use the photostream.  This worked okay in the sense that we shared out some photos.  However, we had to download a 45 meg install file to install icloud on a windows computer.  The install process took 15 minutes AND required a Windows reboot.

Okay, that isn’t the worst but what is the worst is when it is installed and the pictures are viewable they can’t be moved, downloaded or modified.  At this point I am at the 40 minute mark of working on this issue.  I decide to log into icloud.com and check to see if the pictures are there.  Let me share a secret with you. Apple’s “cloud” initiatives are just about useless.  There is no photostream icon that I could see.  Apple may make simple to use operating systems but their walled approach really irritates me.

This brings me right back to the beginning of this objective but 45 minutes later and more frustrated.  I’m trying to think about other ways to getting the pictures off.  Plugging the phone into the computer was not option as the phone is not synced with the specific computer at hand.  All of a sudden I remembered that I setup google+ on the person’s phone and turned on instant uploads.

I navigate to google plus, clicked the photos that need sharing, put in my name and viola! the pictures are accessible to me!

The google plus piece maybe took a total of 5 minutes.  Why can’t apple be so simple?  I have had hardships with others trying to transfer phones and their contacts or notes won’t sync up.  It’s just a frustration to me that people think Apple’s Iphones are so easy to use and the best out there.