The Photo Stream Shuffle

I like Apple’s $29.99 iPad Camera Connection Kit. It turns your iPad into a convenient place to sort and store photos from a digital camera. For example, suppose you are on vacation. You can offload each day’s “keepers” from your camera to your iPad and clear up room on the camera’s memory card for the next day. Later, when you get home, you can connect your iPad to your computer and import the keepers that you saved into your preferred photo app, such as iPhoto.

It’s three simple steps:

1. Take pictures with your digital camera.
2. Transfer keepers to iPad.
3. Copy pictures from iPad to computer.

Now, though, iCloud’s Photo Stream makes the Camera Kit even more convenient. With iCloud, as soon as you transfer your photos to your iPad, they go right into your Photo Stream. From there they are sent automatically to iCloud’s servers when your iPad has an Internet connection and, from there, they automatically download to your computer.

It’s two simple steps:

1. Take pictures with your digital camera.
2. Transfer keepers to Photo Stream via iPad.

There is no Step 3.