All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
One almost inexplicable omission from iOS5's Photo Stream was the lack of a delete button for pictures. For those who haven't used it, or just don't remember, Photo Stream automatically sends photos taken with iOS devices up to iCloud, and then shares them with all your other iCloud-connected devices.
Thus, any picture that was added to the Photo Stream, whether dodgy screenshots, drunken snaps or pictures accidentally dragged into iPhoto on the Mac would linger for 30 days or until you'd taken another 1,000 photos. Like a roofie, the only thing to do was to wait for it to work its way through the system.
Now, amongst the bug fixes in the second beta version of iOS 5.1, pictures can be deleted from Photo Stream, according to the release notes leaked variously over the internet (supposedly for developers' eyes only):
I'm guessing that you'll also be able to delete photos from your iPhoto in future updates.
Why wasn't this in there from the beginning? We'll probably never know for sure, but it seems likely that Apple just didn't want to overload the iCloud servers at launch, what with a new iPhone, a new iOS version and Siri all coming in the same week. Hopefully iOS 5.1 will be released to the public soon: Right now I'm scared to fire up my iPad's Photos app in public.
Photo Stream [Apple]
