By default your My Photo Stream photos are automatically imported into your iPhoto library. If you prefer to manually import photos from My Photo Stream into your iPhoto library, you can turn off Automatic Import in iPhoto preferences. To save photos in My Photo Stream to an iOS device, you must save them to the device’s Camera Roll or to an album.
Here's how you turn off automatic imports from My Photo Stream to your iPhoto library
- Choose iPhoto > Preferences, and then click iCloud.
- Deselect the Automatic Import checkbox.
Manually import items from My Photo Stream to your iPhoto library
- In iPhoto, drag photos from My Photo Stream to Photos in the Source list.
- If iPhoto automatically imports an item from My Photo Stream that was originally uploaded from a different iPhoto library, or from an Aperture library, iPhoto adds the item to the event that matches the one in the original library. If a matching event isn’t in the destination library, iPhoto creates a new event with the same name.