I have been trying to figure out photo stream and despite reading various articles and posts, I'm still confused. For example, before photo stream, I used to take pictures on my iPhone, and when I sync'd with my mac, the photos would be put on my mac, and I would say yes to deleting them from my iPhone. Very simple - my iPhone was a "temporary" place for pictures and my Mac was the master.

Now, after having photo stream on my devices, I am confused because sometimes only a few photos from my iPhone sync to my mac. Is this because if a pic from my iPhone ends up on my mac via photo stream, it will not bother syncing it again? Is this why I keep ending up with more and more photos on my iPhone that aren't ever deleted?

And that leads to the main issue - are those files that ended up on my mac via photo stream really there? When they fall off the end of photo stream due to the 1000 file limit, will they only be on my iPhone?

Ugh. I'm so confused that probably these questions make no sense!

When you take a photo on that device it's stored on that device AND uploaded to your stream.

On your Mac, whether you're using iPhoto or Aperture, the photos have to be downloaded from the stream if you want to keep them (and if memory serves to have them download is the default option). On your iPad, you have to save them out of the stream if you want to keep them on your iPad as well.

However, when you connect your devices physically it will also download them that way, so if you delete a photo from the stream you can still get it right off the device.

I'm not sure if iPhoto/Aperture recognize duplicates (as in, if you downloaded it already from the stream I don't know if it'll be recognized as already being present when you connect your device) because since WiFi syncing became a thing I basically never connect my devices to my computer anymore :-/

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I've noticed in iPhoto, pictures that were in my photo stream appear in a new event labelled "July 2012 Photostream" after the 30 days expire.

Thanks for the info...I've ended up with duplicates somehow so this will help to trace it down.

So it sounds like photo stream can maybe be thought of as a separate device? For example, if in iPhoto I click on Photo Stream and delete a picture, will that deletion get pushed through to all the devices?

And as Garry said, I do indeed have events such as Jul 2012 Photo Stream and these are actual files on my hard drive (as opposed to the previews of photo stream files). So that must be where the auto download is happening - although I don't see that as an option in preferences.

If this is true, I guess it means that if you use photo stream, you can delete pictures from your iPhone once they appear in photo stream because they will (eventually) get downloaded to your mac. This is assuming that deleting a photo on your iPhone doesn't delete it from photo stream as well.

I think Apple needs to do a better job of explaining all this. For example, I am constantly finding that I delete some photos that I don't want, but then they appear again. This must be because I delete them from my mac, but because they have already been uploaded to Photo stream, they come back later! So does this mean I to delete them in two places every time?

Not sure this cloud is too friendly.

For what it's worth, the iPhoto iOS app is really awesome and gives you far more options for customizing, slideshows and the like tan the regular Photos app provides, including access to Photo Stream pics. Much nicer for beaming to AppleTV as well and faster performance.