I stand corrected on the Photo stream data thing. My experience with it is not that it syncs the recent ones first. My experience is they pop in randomly, then it stalls for half an hour for no reason. Maybe it's gotten better recently.

It's still ridiculous that the answer to "I want to send this thing between these two devices in front of me" is "I have to send every photo I take to a server owned by a company somewhere".

Clearly Apple agrees, or they wouldn't have created AirDrop in the first place!