With iOS 5, Apple has at last brought a bit of photo editing to the Photos app. As in Apple's iPhoto app for the Mac, the Auto-Enhance button (which is represented by a magic wand) will instantly improve an image by tweaking settings like sharpness, levels, and contrast, and automatically reducing red-eye. (There's even a nifty animation that shows you it has detected incidents of red-eye and removed them.) You can also manually remove red-eye and rotate and crop images. When cropping, you can choose the crop ratio manually or choose from nine preset crop sizes; while in crop mode, you can also choose to straighten images by using a two-finger rotate gesture.

Also new to Photos is the ability to create and edit photo albums directly on your device; previously, you could edit albums by using a third-party app or by transferring everything back to your computer for editing there. When you add a photo to a new album in iOS 5, it also stays in the main Camera Roll folder.

The most inventive new photo addition is Photo Stream, which is part of the iCloud data-sync service. Photo Stream syncs your most recent thousand photos across all of your iOS devices, iPhoto on your Mac, second-generation Apple TV boxes, and, on Windows PCs, the Pictures Library. You turn on Photo Stream support via the Photos area of the Settings app. Once you turn it on, any new photos you take will be automatically uploaded to iCloud and downloaded on any other device with Photo Stream enabled.

Like the name says, Photo Stream works only for still photos, not videos. And there's no real control over what syncs--all your photos will make the move.