iOS 6: Shared Photo Streams

To check out more blog posts about iOS 6, including my introductory one, click here.

In iOS 5, Apple introduced iCloud, and along with it, Photo Stream. Photo Stream is basically a photo syncing feature. If you take a photo on your iPhone, it'll appear on your iPad and on your computer, or on any device you have set up with Photo Stream. You can add a photo to Photo Stream from any device and it'll show up on all your other devices. That's nice and all, but here's why I don't use it: lack of filtering. No matter where the photo came from (saved from a website, received in a text, taken by the device) it's synced to all your devices. No matter what. You can delete photos from Photo Stream, but it'd be really neat if I could choose what photos are in Photo Stream before they're added.

Now, with iOS 6 comes Shared Photo Streams. That's right, Shared Photo Streams. They're essentially albums you create and choose to share with certain people. If you add a photo to that Stream album, it shows up on everyone's devices that you're sharing the Stream with. Then everyone can comment on and "like" the photos in the Stream, like Facebook.

Another option is to create a web-based album that anyone can get to with a URL. I enabled Shared Photo Streams (Settings > Photos & Camera > Shared Photo Streams toggle) because it's an easy way to get photos from my iPhone to my iPad and vise-versa. Before, I had to fire up iPhoto on each device and use the Beam feature, which took awhile. Then you had to save the beamed photos into your camera roll, one at a time. This system is much better for simply moving photos from one device to another.

Once iOS 6 goes public, the commenting and liking features will get a lot more useful and, I think, pretty cool. It'll be like private Facebook albums built right into iOS, except instead of Facebook calling the shots, it'll be Apple.

Just one more thing getting me excited for September!