I agree that limited access for certain members (especially kids) would be useful, limiting them to read-only or read + add photos (restricting the ability to edit or delete).
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iCloud Shared Photo Library: Everything You Need to Know
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Looks like you are correct. The key words in the article are:
"If you want to upload every photo that you take to the shared library even when not at home or not with a person you share with, there does not appear to be an option for it".
In my own situation, since I am nearly always at home with and within Bluetooth range of my wife it will in practice be fully automatic.
Over the years I have seen many threads from people asking for the Shared Photos Library, and most (all?) of them were from co-habiting couples who were used to having a common library because they previously used a single Apple ID. I believe this feature is largely in response to them. I am not saying there aren't many other usage situations but it gets more complicated when you bring in more people.
As I said earlier Adobe Lightroom Cloudy does the same job as the Apple Shared Photos Library brilliantly, and I am hoping to abandon Adobe and make Apple Shared Photos Lib our main library again.
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I am bagging Apple for this feature for years. However, there is one crucial question that may prevent me from using it.
I have a very large photo library (about 130K photos) which I have been maintaining for many years. I have invested many hours in tagging faces, assigning keywords, and defining smart albums.
What I would like to do is designating the whole library as the shared library. Including everything. From the guides I see around, the only option is to move just the photos. That means that I would have lost all the huge organization efforts I had put in. Can anybody shade some light on this issue?
I have a very large photo library (about 130K photos) which I have been maintaining for many years. I have invested many hours in tagging faces, assigning keywords, and defining smart albums.
What I would like to do is designating the whole library as the shared library. Including everything. From the guides I see around, the only option is to move just the photos. That means that I would have lost all the huge organization efforts I had put in. Can anybody shade some light on this issue?
what happens when i am invited by more than one host?
Really surprised that people seem to be so negative about iCloud Shared Photo Library. I personally think it looks like an amazing feature to have built-in to the Camera app and the Photo app and I know quite a few families for who this will be a game changer. I mean, what other company offers a solution as good as this for sharing photos?
I agree with your enthusiasm but there is an answer to your question....Lightroom Cloudy, but it costs £9.99 per month.
I am really looking forward to having all our devices on iOS16/macOS13 and properly comparing the new Apple Shared Photos library with Lightroom Cloudy. I would like to dump Adobe Lightroom but it is very good IME.
It looks like we are limited to one personal library and one shared library. I would like one personal library, one library shared with my wife, and one library shared with my family. The design decision to automatically add to the shared library when at home or within bluetooth range of somebody in the shared library kind of makes this impossible though. My thinking is that the smarts were designed to only cover the simplest case rather than providing flexibility and advanced options as well.
I think they meant that the notification to move a deleted item to the personal library should be available for photos (and videos) deleted by you AND OTHERS.
I think this shouldn't be hard to implement (especially in betas), with the notifications for "deleted by you" being opt-out and "deleted by others" being disabled by default.
If I set up the shared library to automatically share photos of certain people, can I manually move some of these photos back to my personal library afterwards?
This is a complete mess. Does anybody at Apple use their own products ?
iCloud shared storage : I've canceled all the indivual plans and every single member of my family of 5 shares the 2TB. Great, but I still get billed for the storage for my daughter. I've verified everything, and it shouldn't be active anymore. Figures.
Shared album : I'm just back from a 5 day trip to Paris with the kids and wife. Wanted to share photos each day with them (transferred from my Canon Eos R) as well as with the parents and other family members.
Boy, what a disaster.
It took ages just to create and get the share link for 50 photos (my selection for a day). They all had to wait from a few hours up to a full day to see them all. Each time I had to tell them how many photos was in an album, just for them to be sure they didn't miss any, because of course every memeber got a different incomplete set of photos...
Shared Library: Are you kidding ? I'm already the tech support for too many stuff, and I'm not interested at all in seeing all the crazy stuff my teens are doing. This is a disaster in the making, embarrassing both parents and children.
Seeing the weird and half baked stuff Apple is pulling these days, I can't but think there are only sad lonely people making decisions. It reminds me about some church behaviours, where men utterly disconnected fom reality are trying to push ideas that are not only unrealistic but sometimes even offensive.
Is it that complicated to create a proper icloud drive app, set a folder as photo or automatically do it based on the content, and share the link to this folder so that anyone or selected people with the link can view it ?
Google did that years (a decade ?) ago. It's simple. Efficient. Understable by anyone.
If Google didn't pull the plug from the free tier on Google photos I would still be using that. Now there's no real alternative, and the company I'm already paying because I have to (storage) does such a poor job that I really want to jump ship.
I'm still staying because ecosystem and family habits, but man is it pissing me to see such a wealthy company as Apple keeping doing that stuff. It's insulting and borderline consumer hostile.
iCloud shared storage : I've canceled all the indivual plans and every single member of my family of 5 shares the 2TB. Great, but I still get billed for the storage for my daughter. I've verified everything, and it shouldn't be active anymore. Figures.
Shared album : I'm just back from a 5 day trip to Paris with the kids and wife. Wanted to share photos each day with them (transferred from my Canon Eos R) as well as with the parents and other family members.
Boy, what a disaster.
It took ages just to create and get the share link for 50 photos (my selection for a day). They all had to wait from a few hours up to a full day to see them all. Each time I had to tell them how many photos was in an album, just for them to be sure they didn't miss any, because of course every memeber got a different incomplete set of photos...
Shared Library: Are you kidding ? I'm already the tech support for too many stuff, and I'm not interested at all in seeing all the crazy stuff my teens are doing. This is a disaster in the making, embarrassing both parents and children.
Seeing the weird and half baked stuff Apple is pulling these days, I can't but think there are only sad lonely people making decisions. It reminds me about some church behaviours, where men utterly disconnected fom reality are trying to push ideas that are not only unrealistic but sometimes even offensive.
Is it that complicated to create a proper icloud drive app, set a folder as photo or automatically do it based on the content, and share the link to this folder so that anyone or selected people with the link can view it ?
Google did that years (a decade ?) ago. It's simple. Efficient. Understable by anyone.
If Google didn't pull the plug from the free tier on Google photos I would still be using that. Now there's no real alternative, and the company I'm already paying because I have to (storage) does such a poor job that I really want to jump ship.
I'm still staying because ecosystem and family habits, but man is it pissing me to see such a wealthy company as Apple keeping doing that stuff. It's insulting and borderline consumer hostile.
I did this yesterday and like you said just a few stayed in my personal folder. Bummer as my iMac was my primary storage device for photos and is a 2012 iMac, so right I guess there is no way to get those back or updated to the shared library that has them all now. Not sure how Apple could have missed this. They better fix it before the public release or there will be tons of angry customers.
this sounds bizarre to me, aside from a similar name to a pre-existing shared photo album feature the fact this is a space hit on the folder owner is crazy! I understand shared photo albums have the picture quality/file size limitation but for some thats something they accept.
I’d imagine this is going to be primarily used in immediate families. Like husband and wife couples. Maybe a kid or two. The number of couples who actively use Apple Photos in the cloud and don’t have family plan iCloud space is probably pretty small.
This ended up saving our family tons of space because it cut down on storage space of photos we both had in our library.
Yep, Apple does seem to complicate things and often not even with the user ending up with a great result. I have been paying a reasonable price for Google One for a couple of years now and I am pleased with what I get from it. No iCloud for me at present or in the future.
I’ve used Lightroom cloud in the past and don’t recall any sort of family features? I didn’t see anything new based on a quick google search. Just curious what you are referring to.
This is the perfect solution for my husband and I. Right now, it's such a pain for us to send pics to each other to hav out own libraries.
Two questions though – (1) Can there be two shared libraries set up by different people that are in the same iCloud family setup? And (2), can an Organizer, who owns a Shared Library, ALSO be invited to someone else's Shared Library?
Use Case: My iCloud family setup includes myself, my husband, and my mother and father. We'd like a shared library for myself and by husband. My parents would like a shared library for themselves. I THINK that sounds like it would work. Could my parents then also invite me to use their shared library?
Two questions though – (1) Can there be two shared libraries set up by different people that are in the same iCloud family setup? And (2), can an Organizer, who owns a Shared Library, ALSO be invited to someone else's Shared Library?
Use Case: My iCloud family setup includes myself, my husband, and my mother and father. We'd like a shared library for myself and by husband. My parents would like a shared library for themselves. I THINK that sounds like it would work. Could my parents then also invite me to use their shared library?
Setting up the shared library is completely separate from the family group you may already have setup sharing storage, etc. It will be no problem for your wife and you to share and album and your mother and father to share a separate one.
You can only be involved in one shared album at a time though. At some point maybe they can expand, but I could see the UI getting pretty cumbersome with multiple shared libraries.
There is another new feature though, where you can set a list of people that it will recommend photos to share if they are taken while with them. It’s just a nicer UI around the share a group of photos through iMessage feature that has been around for a bit though. If you haven’t used it though it makes it easy to auto add all shared photos or a selection to your library.
WHOA! Are you saying that if you have an older Mac that can't be updated to Ventura but newer iDevices that will support the latest iOS and you enable Shared Library on the newer devices, the the older Mac will automatically move all your photos to the Shared Library but you won't be able to see them or retrieve them on the older Mac? Is that what you are saying?
How do existing shared albums transferred to? I have dup photos for this and wonder how it’ll be handled,
I’m not clear on the functionality to share photos instantly from the camera. Once you choose to share your entire library, is it not now happening in real time as you take pictures or does it only share the entire library as it was at that point and you have to continue to manually share additional photos as you take them?
Even after reading the really good explanation article, your post is an example of why it still gives me a little anxiety.
If what you say is true, it’s exactly why shared iCloud library scares me. I really hope that someone else can’t accidentally delete a photo that I took and loaded to the shared.
Yes.
I ran chronosync which syncs my library to another drive afterwards I looked in my trash and it was filled with all of my photos.
My phone was on the beta and my Mac wasn’t. The mac only showed around 1,000 files out of 30,000. all of the photos are still in the cloud, but the non updated Mac could only see the 1,000 that were left in the personal folder. My phone showed the full amount. Even iCloud.com saw 1,000. I had to use the beta iCloud.com site to see the full library.
When looking at iCloud in the macs preference pane it showed all the space used for the 30,000 photos, but, it only told me there were 1,000 photos, the amount left in personal. Though it doesn’t say personal, it just says 1,000 photos.
It took me all last weekend to figure out what the heck was wrong with it.
I’m glad I have about 5 backups of my library.