IOS – How to delete just the videos from the iPhone

Photostream will store the previous 30 days worth of photos automatically. That means, every photo you take on your iOS devices will be sent to Photostream, but only the last 30 days worth of photos will be available there.

If you enable 'Automatic Import' of Photostream in iPhoto (Preferences > Photostream > Automatic Import) then when you launch iPhoto, it will automatically download a copy of any photos that are in your Photostream, and automatically create an Event titled: {MMM YYYY} Photo Stream (eg. "Jul 2012 Photo Stream")

This Event will be automatically kept up to date, as long as iPhoto is open long enough to sync everything required (depends on your connection).

In effect, as long as you open iPhoto once every 30 days and leave it open long enough for your Photostream to be imported, you should never have to manually import a photo from your iOS device at all.

As for removing items from your Camera Roll on your iOS device, as long as you see that they are present in Photostream (or in iPhoto), then it is safe to delete them from your device. (There is no way around this but to do it manually as far as I know.)

Currently, Photostream does not support videos. To import videos, connect your iOS device to iPhoto and import these manually.

As a side note, in order to keep some photos on the device, you can create a smart album in iPhoto along the lines of "Photos taken within the last 30 days" or "Photos rated 4 stars or more", and configure iTunes to sync these to your device. That way, you can be sure that no matter if you clear your Camera Roll on your device, or delete certain photos, you maintain some convenience.

No - there is no easy way to just tell iCloud to omit part of the camera roll. I suppose a jailbreak could theoretically work in this functionality but I'm not up on what is possible in that realm.

Two workarounds seem practical today:

1. Manage those videos in another app (Vimeo/iMovie seem clunky and undesirable for this but perhaps something like DropBox would work if you didn't mind the extra steps of migrating and then deleting video assets from the roll).
2. Give up iCloud backup of the camera roll contents and depend on iCloud Photo Stream for eventual backup to a computer.

I've seen the second option work for people once they were acquainted with how the archival process works on a computer pulling from Photo Stream. Since iCloud backup is usually a half day behind in backing up, the stream is generally faster at getting a still photo off your device than the backup mechanism.

If you are OK with a computer regularly importing the photos from the stream before the 1000 image / 30 day limit starts deleting them from the stream, you could turn off the Camera Roll from your iPhone's backup options:

Selecting Turn Off & Delete will reclaim your space in a minute or so. Just be sure your current camera roll has been totally imported before selecting the red delete option.

Since videos do not go to the photo stream, you will need to transfer them off your device to make a backup copy of them going forward when needed.