Pipe your hotmail through a Gmail account, either by forwarding everything from Hotmail to Gmail or by setting Gmail to download your Hotmail using POP.
Configure your Gmail to send using your Hotmail credentials.
Then access your Gmail in Mail.app via IMAP.
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.
Best Answer
You can happily place the library and have it share out. You will need to have iPhoto running at all times in order to have the library visible to other users tho.
When you connect to the library from another Mac, you will not be able to use the same Events/Albums views that you have locally. Some of it is available, but mainly it just throws a huge list of all your stuff that is not organised in the same way as you would expect if it was local. Also, it's SLOW, in that it seems to almost cache the contents each time you connect which can take a while, and subsequent navigation is not quick either.
Another way to do this, is to share out the folder that the iPhoto data resides in, rather than opening iPhoto and sharing your library via the app. This has the advantage that iPhoto does not need to be running on the Mini, although the disadvantage is your Apple TV won't connect. This will however open the library in the same way as if it were local (in essence it is local, just on a network drive). You can test this out by holding OPTION down as you start iPhoto, it will let you connect to a different library.
All in all, it's not a great solution either way. I long for a sensible way of sharing in iPhoto and iTunes that does not require the apps to be running at the time (just a background sharing daemon would be great), that allows you to navigate and modify as if they were local, but it does't really exist for either app, and any solution is substandard to your local install workflows.