Jesse Hollington on Deleting Photos From iCloud Photo Stream

Jesse Hollington:

Photo Stream as it existed in iOS 5.0 and related iCloud components was a very simple “push” technology that required absolutely no tracking or syncing; new photos simply got pushed to every device after which iOS, iCloud and iPhoto/Aperture could basically forget about them.

The ability to actually delete photos from a Photo Stream requires synchronization of existing photo content…. Suddenly Apple’s iCloud servers and related client components have to keep track of every photo in the Photo Stream individually so that they can push delete operations across all devices. Of course it’s not rocket science, but it does add an extra layer of complexity to the process.

I’m not saying it’s easy. (I try never to make any assumptions about how hard or easy it would be to add any given feature.) What I’m saying is, no matter how hard it was to allow deletion of individual pictures from Photo Stream, it shouldn’t have been released until the delete feature was ready.

On the other hand, that’s the advantage of software over hardware. You can omit an essential feature and then hustle to get it into your first major update. Good luck adding volume buttons to your Kindle Fire.

★ Wednesday, 14 December 2011