Originally Posted by Stereo Steve:
“I have to admit that Android, in my view, handles photos better than iOS. For a user like me who hasn't the will to understand what's going on, all this iCloud, camera roll etc is just confusing. Why are some photos duplicated on my iPad but not on the PC? Where actually are they? If I delete them on the iPad, does that delete them from everything?
I'm sure there are many shouting 'it's so simple you idiot' but the fact is it ain't.
Also,last time I tried to edit a photo, I ended up getting it onto the PC where it made sense. It's probably possible but certainly not intuitive to the casual user so I agree, that could be improved.
More of a software thing than hardware really though.”
I think its confusing because there are two separate services. If you don't have iCloud Photo Library turned on then you have local pictures and a "photo stream" which stores the last 100 in the cloud and all other iOS, Mac and Windows machines (with the applet) download. You can turn this off though.
If you have iCloud Photo Library then you probably need to buy iCloud space, but you then get to keep your albums/folders in the cloud, and every device can see them but any change on any iOS, or Mac device affects all the others. Windows can't change the cloud but the applet can download copies of the pictures.
I was using iCloud Photo Library (50gb storage is 79p/month) but I'm going to stop as I don't use my ancient Mac anymore, and so I'll keep photos in OneDrive instead as I have a lot of space thanks to Office 365.
Google Photos has a maximum resolution that means the pictures from my DSLR would be degraded, so I ignored that, but it may be good for others.