Are you confused as to the best workflow for your iPhone photos. I am! 
At least for my traditional photos, I get it, here’s what I do:

  1. Download the photos
  2. Delete the ones I don’t like. I’ve been using Preview when it isn’t too slow (but it’s gotten unbearable with Yosemite), so use Lightroom for that
  3. Touchup usually with DxO to create JPEGS and keep all the RAWs in the their own directory
  4. Sort by date and put into /year/month/day 
  5. Find good ones and put them into separate folders
  6. Rsync these into at least three places locally and then 2-3 places in the cloud (Bluehost, Crashplan and eventually Amazon photo sharing)
  7. Longer term make one of these a ZFS store locally with scrubbing

To integrate them into photo sharing

  1. Import the photos into iPhoto
  2. Create shared albums (most of the family is on Apple products so this works very easily without new client software).

However, with iPhones, there are many other ways to push content and part of that has been to in the Photo Stream days

  1. Copy the photos down from the iPhone and delete them
  2. Put them into the same directory structure and touch up with DxO as appropriate (I put the original JPGS into the Raw folders

However with the new photo library, I’m not sure how this should work. Here’ show Photo Library is different, the main thing is that there is a separate “Camera Roll” and “Photostream” anymore. Instead what happens is that any photo you’ve taken on “any” iOS device now appear in the “All Photos” section. There is no distinction between local photos and things in the stream.
This has a few implications:

  1. In the old days, I’d use iPhone to import and then delete the local “Camera Roll” now when I do this, the photos don’t seem to disappear from the iPhone?! So you have to manually delete all the photos on your phone.
  2. What’s even more confusing is that on none IOS devices (eg on your Mac or AppleTV), the “My Photostream” still exists and remains the last 1000 photos that you’ve taken. Confused yet. So you get a different view of things on your phone vs your Mac. 
  3. If you are confused as to what is actually in iCloud, then you can use http://icloud.com to see what is actually up there. I’ve had bugs before where the Photo Library wasn’t syncing properly. However at least for me, the iCloud Photos hangs on start :-*(

I’m Rich & Co.

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