iCloud Husband and Wife iCloud to 1 Photos Library

[warrenal]

I'm looking for a new safer and less time consuming photos management and back-up solution. I currently keep photos library on external and 2x a year download recent photos/videos off my wife and my devices and then adding to master file and deleting from photo. I'm considering moving to iCloud to automate this process, benefit from cloud security, and advantage of viewing all my historical photos and videos on iPhone. From what I can tell, my wife and I can't have separate Apple accounts and take our own photos/videos that will then automatically sync back to 1 master photos library in iCloud thereby removing external? Am I thinking about this the right way and what's the best way to accomplish?

 

[Apple_Robert]

You are correct.

I would use an attached external drive on your Mac, where you and your wife store your photos, and then each of you can decide what photos you want on your respective phones. You can also store all the photos using your account and then provide your wife a share link to the photo folder on your cloud drive, if that works better for you.

 

[warrenal]

Thanks @Apple_Robert. Sounds like #1 is what I'm doing now but it gets super messy and annoying especially because my wife insists on having some old pics of son on phone so it's impossible to know what to delete after backing up. For option #2, are her photos storing and backing up automatically to the shared folder and can she also access the entire library? It's crazy Apple hasn't solved for this!

 

[warrenal]

I guess another alternate would be just to archive our legacy combined photos library and back-up via iCloud Drive and then we each have separate photos libraries that are backed up automatically via iCloud Photos app with the understanding that sometime in future we combine all into 1 once Apple gets their head together and develops a fix?