Can you force Photo Stream to sync with a device?

My Photo Stream was full up with all sorts of odd rubbish, so I backed up all this up & then deleted it from my iPhone 5, and exported images I actually want to see into Photo Stream via iPhoto.

Yes, they're all sitting there, says iPhoto.

No, your Photo Stream is empty, says my iPhone!

To try and force a sync, I've done all the things to the phone I've seen suggested elsewhere (e.g. switch Photo Stream on & off, hard reboot, switch Wi-Fi off & on, made sure my charge is over 20%, etc.) - all this is useless. Does anyone else here have even the remotest idea as to what might work, because this is just rubbish! (My Mac is running Mavericks btw.)

(PS. I only use Camera Roll as my temporary photo home, and back up & clean weekly. Photo Stream is what I want on my phone as a small 'library', to be updated/changed as & when I please.)

Have you logged on of iCloud on your mac. And logged back in ensuring you use the same credentials as your iPhone?

If you take a photo on your phone can you see it in the iPhoto photostream?

Just as an aside your kind-of using the photo library and photostream back-to-front in the way they are intended to be used.

mrplow said:

Have you logged on of iCloud on your mac. And logged back in ensuring you use the same credentials as your iPhone?

If you take a photo on your phone can you see it in the iPhoto photostream?

Just as an aside your kind-of using the photo library and photostream back-to-front in the way they are intended to be used.

Click to expand...

Thanks a lot - I did all those things. What was happening was that the Photostream was just taking ages to load up on my phone (whereas it was immediate on my iPad). I was then horrified to see another pile of old junk from my Pictures folders, as well as the images I actually wanted there! Then of course, I twigged - there are always 1000 images in PS, aren't there? And if you delete some, it fills up the gap again. (But why from my old folders? That's one I don't get.)

Anyway, I found a solution - shared Photostreams. I set one up, shared only by myself, and have put everything I want into there. I've cleared out my PS (again!) and set my devices to only see the shared one and not the main one. (I'm keeping the main one going in iPhoto, because I need to check what's going on in it now and then.)

I was quite proud of myself for doing this, but after a bit of research I found that loads of other people had recommended it as well. It's well worth doing - you can store up to 500K photos there, and they don't use allocated iCloud storage - what's not to like?!

(Helpful article on shared Photostreams - Shared Photo Streams.)