Question :

My iPhone is a business device, so I want to sync my ‘business life’ including Contacts, Calendars, Mail, Documents & Data, etc to my MacBook Pro… but I want my upload/sync the photo’s I’ve made with this ‘business’ iPhone to our shared ‘family’ Mac which holds our family’s entire iPhoto-database. iCloud doesn’t seem to enable me to do so… what can I do ?

Answer :

Even though you can setup a secondary iCloud account on your iPhone, you cannot do what you would like to do, because :

1- Photostream is only supported for your primary iCloud account (*)

(*) UPDATE d.d. September 20th 2012: only when running iPhoto 9.4 or newer on OSX 10.8.2 or newer, you have the option to subscribe to a ‘Shared’ Photo Stream besides your primary iCloud account’s Photo Stream

If you want to this ‘Shared Photo Stream’ feature on an older, officially unsupported Intel-Mac, you could consider installing a patched version of OSX 10.8 – for more info, look here :

fixed : install OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion on unsupported Macs

2- Documents & Data syncing is only supported for your primary iCloud account

…so using iCloud you will never be able to make the logical split between Documents & Data sync (which is strictly ‘business’) and Photostream (which is mainly ‘family’)…

The only solution at this moment is to find an alternative to Photostream… and I’ve found (only) one : Eye-Fi does the trick !

And… Eye-Fi is free (free account, free iOS-app & free Mac-app ; by SanDisk)

download it here for OSX :

http://support.eye.fi/downloads/center/

and download the iOS-app here :

http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/eye-fi/id306011124?mt=8

the only thing you need to beware of is that the Eye-Fi App needs to be running/open on your iPhone/iPad and on your Mac both Eye-Fi Center and iPhoto need to be running/open…

…so it still feels a little more ‘manual’ than iCloud Photostream, since you need not forget to open the Eye-Fi App…

…but that’s a small price to pay, since you get 3 things that iCloud doesn’t give you :

– auto-transfer of your video recordings into iPhoto

– a free online gallery (like the one we lost when ‘upgrading’ from MobileMe to iCloud)

– separation of your ‘photostream’ from your primary iCloud-account

Note :

even though using DropBox might seem to be a valid alternative to iCloud’s Photostream also, since it does auto-upload of iPad/iPhone pictures to ‘the cloud’… it is not really useful in the end, as it does not provide auto-import into iPhoto…