The Camera Roll stores only the pictures you've taken since your last sync to iPhoto. The intended (pre-Photo Stream) workflow seems to be:
1. Take picture with the phone -> iPhone's "Camera Roll".
2. Sync phone with iPhoto and delete pics from phone -> iPhoto's "Last Import".
3. Organize pics in iPhoto -> iPhoto's "Albums" and "Events".
4. Sync phone with iTunes, including pics -> iPhone's "Events".
Note that iPhoto will automatically group pics into events by date, which along with the "Last 3 Months" and "Last 12 Months" albums giving you at least some ability to find photos chronologically.
I'm not claiming that this is a good workflow, or that it was designed with the user's best interests in mind! Rather, it seems to be one of the many obvious and annoying inconveniences that show how much importance places on locking users into iTunes as their media-management tool.
(The primary example of which is that Apple will sell you a giant hard drive in a WiFi backup appliance, and a WiFi->HDMI box that pipes content from your Mac to your TV... but not a media/backup server with HDMI and a giant hard drive, which is all we really want, right?)
1. Take picture with the phone -> iPhone's "Camera Roll". 2. Sync phone with iPhoto and delete pics from phone -> iPhoto's "Last Import". 3. Organize pics in iPhoto -> iPhoto's "Albums" and "Events". 4. Sync phone with iTunes, including pics -> iPhone's "Events".
Note that iPhoto will automatically group pics into events by date, which along with the "Last 3 Months" and "Last 12 Months" albums giving you at least some ability to find photos chronologically.
I'm not claiming that this is a good workflow, or that it was designed with the user's best interests in mind! Rather, it seems to be one of the many obvious and annoying inconveniences that show how much importance places on locking users into iTunes as their media-management tool.
(The primary example of which is that Apple will sell you a giant hard drive in a WiFi backup appliance, and a WiFi->HDMI box that pipes content from your Mac to your TV... but not a media/backup server with HDMI and a giant hard drive, which is all we really want, right?)