If you’ve got the new Photo Stream feature in iCloud enabled on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, each and every photo you take (including images you save from the web) will get synced automatically to all of your Photo Stream-connected handhelds or computers—and once you share a photo in Photo Stream, there’s no easy way to unshare it.
Update: Good news. Thanks to an update to Apple’s mobile iOS software, you now can delete photos from Photo Stream. Read this article for more details.
That said, you can temporarily disable Photo Stream on your iPhone or iPad, snap or save the images you don’t want shared in iCloud, and then turn Photo Stream back on.
Here’s how you do it.
- On your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, tap Settings, iCloud, Photo Stream, and switch Photo Stream off.
- Once you hit the “Off” switch, all the Photo Stream pictures saved on your device will be automatically deleted. (Keep in mind, though, that the deleted Photo Stream images are all still sitting in your iCloud account, as well as on any other devices or systems connected to your iCloud account that have Photo Stream enabled.)
- Go ahead and snap some photos or save an image from the mobile Safari browser (which you can do by tapping and holding an image, then tap the “Save Image” button that appears).
- All done? Now go back to Settings, tap iCloud, and switch Photo Stream back on. Any Photo Stream images saved in iCloud will be re-downloaded to your device (assuming you’re in Wi-Fi range), but the photos you took while Photo Stream was disabled won’t be uploaded.
- To make sure everything’s working property again, take another photo; the new snapshot should be shared automatically in Photo Stream.