Dealing with iCloud Accounts and Photo Stream Issues

After my initial excitement subsided, I decided that I didn’t want to use the same Apple ID that I use for App Store purchases with my iCloud account. In iOS 5, you can go into Settings.app and sign out and delete an iCloud account and it’s respective data set if you so wish.

Here’s how to do it:

I had a lingering Mobile Me account that wasn’t being used as well, so I instead decided to convert that and use it as my iCloud account. Even though I don’t use the email service, I really wanted the ability to have iCloud store my notes (from Notes.app). The problem after deleting my existing iCloud account and adding the newly converted Mobile Me account, was I ended up with a duplicate “Photo Stream” in Photos.app. You would think you would be able to access those photos via the icloud.com web app, however I had no such luck. You can however delete photos through the latest iPhoto (9.2 or newer), but you can’t outright delete the entire Photo Stream itself.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no way to delete Photo Stream from the Photos app itself, so what I ended up doing to fix the problem was simply to turn off Photo Stream and re-enable it. That pretty much fixes this issue for me, however it’s too bad that iCloud doesn’t backup video content as well.