How do I sync my old phone numbers to my iPhone?

What is the correct or Apple's intended way to deal with photos on one's iPhone or iPad, ie: are you supposed to sync them off your phone onto your pc and/or into iCloud? If you want photos on your phone/iPad are you supposed to sync them back?

• I've read in a number of places that just leaving them on your phone and not syncing them off leads to problems and long delays when backing up the iPhone/iPad but syncing them off and then copying them back solves this problem and is the preferred and intended approach.

• Answer:

  The intention is for the device, whether it be desktop, laptop, iPad, iPhone or iPoohsticks (don't you dare use this, it's copyrighted!) to be irrelevant. You take a photo or video on a device and it is promptly transferred to your cloud-space, thereby making it readily available to all other devices in your ownership / management domain. In fact, if you project this one step further, this holds true about any file or action, for that matter. Create a presentation on your iPad? Your desktop knows it... Listen to a podcast on your laptop? Your iPhone knows of it, and will pick up where you left off... Take a photo of a bird in Central Park on your iPhone? Your friend can see it within seconds while sitting in Golden Gate Park (provided they subscribe to your PhotoStream). And you don't utilize email to do it!!! At this point in time, with your desktop and/or laptop equipped with a full-fledged copy of the appropriate software (iPhoto, Aperture, Photoshop, http://et.al.) and a larger-capacity drive space, the iOS device acts as an extended tool -- you take the photo and it is relayed to your cloud-space. You have ready (notice I do not say instant... that's the burden of the ISP's of today) access to it, and then manipulate it on your desktop/laptop to suit, and then place it back on a net-based media (website, Flikr gallery, Facebook, iCloud gallery, http://et.al.), thus making it readily (notice again I don't say instant, because that's the burden of the mobile data plan providers of today) available to you on your iOS devices. The whole concept of "originals" is basically retired. The problem of which you speak of relates to how the recently created photos are treated on your iOS device. Before PhotoStream, photos you took with the phone were placed in Active Queue Cache (not an official term), which some of you fellow geeks will identify as "volatile" -- meaning that if the phone is damaged, shorts out, etc. or suffers a corruption, or any number of things, the files are more than very quite likely gone. Those photos are held in that volatile storage space for one reason -- not to be displayed, not to be kept (we get lazy, though), but to be relayed somewhere. They want to be sent somewhere with more permanent storage and file structure. Until PhotoStream, we had to get home, sit down, and hook up the cable. PhotoStream does away with that cable. But of course we get lazy. This is why your nineteen-year-old cousin squeals at you when you inquire as to when the last time she sync'd it back to her computer, and what did she expect to happen to the photos on her phone when she dropped the phone in the pool? (true story) And when backing up, the created "shadow" that is a backup file is not supposed to be large -- as in, it's not intended to hold all that material, Active Cache included, in it. It's a glorified checklist in a XML-like arrangement. You have this app, this app, this app, this app, not this app, this gallery, this song, etc. etc. ad nauseum. and all these things are located (on your parent computer) here here here and here. If your phone is kept "lite", you'll be amazed at how fast a backup happens and how relatively small that backup shadow file is. When you have alot of material in the caches (plural, because due to sandboxing each app has its own cache impression), that causes the shadow file to bloat. Photos and videos are the most egregious due to their file size. So, once the photos are taken with an iOS device, they are accessed in PhotoStream and then relayed to any of the appropriate media you want, and then you access that media on the iOS device (and/or app within it).