Say hello to picture-perfect photo syncing.

As if your Photo Stream isn’t filled with cat pictures.

Of all iCloud’s features, Photo Stream is the closest to being truly magical. No, really. It’s a photo album in the cloud that contains up to 1,000 of your latest photos, storing new ones for 30 days, and it doesn’t count against your standard iCloud storage capacity. Best of all, you only have to keep doing what you’re doing now to use it. Take pictures with your iOS device, or import .jpg, .tif, .png, and most RAW files into iPhoto or Aperture, and they’re all available automatically to your iCloud devices—even Apple TV. Don’t worry about burning through your iPhone or iPad’s data plan, either, since Photo Stream syncs only over Wi-Fi. In iOS, you can also use Wi-Fi or 3G to download shots at space-saving resolutions sized for your device, and all Photo Stream images are automatically downloaded at full resolution to your Mac or PC. After you do so, you can back them up for safekeeping.

Edits to your Photo Stream pics are nondestructive.

You can do more with Photo Stream pictures than just view and save them. You can edit them, too. In iOS, just go to Photos > Albums > Photo Stream, and tap the picture you want to tweak. After you make changes, you’ll be prompted to save a copy to your Camera Roll, leaving the original picture intact. And since any image added to your Camera Roll—including those from third-party photo apps—gets synced to Photo Stream, your new file will be pushed to the cloud, too. In iPhoto, you can browse your last 1,000 masterpieces in the Photo Stream album in the sidebar. Similarly, selecting a picture and clicking anything but the Info button will prompt you to continue the operation on the copy that’s already been saved to your iPhoto library. Yep, Apple takes protecting your Photo Stream seriously, and that may not always be a good thing, depending on who (or what) you took pictures of at last weekend’s party. While you can’t delete individual pictures from your Photo Stream, you can log in to iCloud.com and click Advanced > Reset Photo Stream to nuke ’em all. This measure of last resort won’t remove saved Photo Stream pictures from your devices, but it will give you a clean slate going forward.