iPhone iOS Family Sharing - Default photo location

[Skibba]

Hi,

I've recently migrated from Android/Google to try and simplify mine and my wife's lives a bit. She's already an iPhone user but is using a iPhone 5 with pretty low memory. She would frequently tell me her phone was full again and she'd create a backup on her PC, wipe the device, and then I'd copy the photos into my Google Photos account so that she could continue to use her phone.

Now we're both on iOS I've set up family sharing, and she's now using the shared 200gb storage plan as her default, we've got a shared family calendar, and I've now just finished a Google Photos > Google Drive > 'Photos' migration of our combined photo library on my Mac Mini which has only been used for a media server up until this point.

The questions I have are:-

1) Can I set it so that both mine and my wife's photos which we take on our phones are automatically saved to the shared family album, as opposed to me having to copy over the files we want to be able to both see.

2) My wife just said her iPhone is full again. As she's now backing up to the shared family storage, is she ok to just wipe the photos off her device, and if so how do I as the family account administrator access her backup to copy those files into the shared album?

Thanks in advance, and sorry if this is obvious, but I've had a quick google and checked a few things in the settings on iOS but I couldn't find an answer. I want to make sure I'm solid on how things work before preaching to my wife how good this new ecosystem is

 

[Skibba]

Bit more digging and answers I've come up with are:-

1) No. Each individual's photos will only save to their iCloud account. From there they can share photos into a family album.

2) When copying files from personal photo library into the family library, it creates a copy, so it's a totally different photo (and lower quality I may add), so the answer to this one is that she can wipe all photos from her phone to free up space, provided she's copied them to the family library beforehand.

Not quite as simple and seamless as I'd hoped. If anyone has an opinion which differs to what I've discovered, please weigh in, or if you know of a better solution let me know.

Looks like I may be better off keeping a combo of google photos and icloud for backups/shared calendars, e.g. set my wife up on her iPhone with a google account and set the photo roll to auto upload there. I'd migrate all historic photos into her new google photos library, then set this up as a shared library which I can contribute to.