[petenixey]

Or, for another perspective:

1. Pick the best (free) iOS management tool for the job at the time

2. Invest eight years of curation and 70Gb of photos in it

3. Use the setup with more than one device and the same way that 20M+ other users use it

4. Expect that I shouldn't have to be a contortionist to continue to do so

[Terretta]

I have over a terabyte of photos in Aperture, family has half a terabyte in iPhoto, whole family uses photostreams, nobody has your issues.

Apple doesn't have a great guide for best practice, and should fix that. But most of the troubles you outline, I feel you're "doing it wrong" or are actually flat wrong about how it works. This may be a training issue Apple should address.

As just one example, I very specifically want my device camera roll and combined photo stream separate. Combining them as you suggest has severely negative consequences your article doesn't consider. Edits on iOS carry over to desktop, you can edit on the loo all day if that suits your style. You never ever have to delete photos from your photo stream and no Apple dialog tells you to delete from photostream. If you set prefs right, you'll get photos imported exactly once.

Your letter raises awareness that people like photos. That's good.

But while waiting, look into some of the prefs dialogs in Aperture or iPhoto. I'm comfortable that every need you mentioned is handled.

But if you still can't find satisfaction for your particular workflow (e.g. photo pro doing commercial work in studio and on laptop in field), check out Image Capture plus the lesser known Auto Importer scriptable tool. You may have to mindlessly plug in a cable after a shoot or at least once in 30 days, but you won't have to press a key.

[josteink]

> 1. Pick ... iOS ... for the job at the time

And voila, you have found yourself a closed system which wont let you treat your data as yours, just as pointed out in the comment you replied to.

There is nothing wrong with pointing out that Apple has a closed solution here, and that the solution is seriously lacking.

[brown9-2]

What are the complaints in the original article about not being able to treat your data as your own?

The complaints as I read them are about pain points in syncing and accessing the different photos you have spread across different Apple devices, and how whatever sync features exist today ("Photo streams") exacerbate rather than improve the situation.

[pessimizer]

All of them, I think. If any vendor were allowed to drop photo management software (as a first class citizen) on Apple machines, software that would even be allowed to manipulate their current cloud library through an open API - would anybody be asking Apple for anything?