Syncing photos from wife and husbands iCloud?

[sammyman]

Best way to sync photos with iCloud for husband and wife?

I've been away using google photos for the last 3 years for various reasons. Just got back in the Apple ecosystem, and want to reimport my google photos to a photo library. I'd like to make sure my wife and I are all backed up. We have together over 700gb of photos.

What is the best way to keep everything synced together?


I'm thinking I'll sign into icloud with my wife's username, and choose to just sync her photos.

Also, we only have one mac. Otherwise, maybe we'd keep this separate, but I'm thinking I'd like to keep everything in one location. Thanks

 

[GumaRodak]

There are shared albums option

 

[sammyman]

There are shared albums option

Is that a better option than sharing everything with one icloud password? Also, with only one mac computer in the house, does it make more sense to just have one icloud password? Trying to understand our options before I start merging photo libraries.

 

[GumaRodak]

If you will share one icloud account, you wife will have access to everything like messages, mail etc..if you have one computer you can use two users on it

 

[Brian33]

Do you each have iPhones? If so, I assume you each have your own Apple IDs. I don't think you'd want to share one Apple ID!

I would make two different accounts on the one Mac. Your photos will get synced to your Mac account's Photos library, and her photos will sync to her Mac account.

Photos isn't really designed to have one library shared by multiple people, as far as I can tell. You can create a shared album, and maybe put everything into that. I wonder if that would double your iCloud storage space usage, though. I think every photo you put in the shared album would be copied to her iCloud storage... but I don't know for sure...

 

[scotty2shots]

There is a way for different iPhones to share one iCloud Photo Library, but yes, it involves some sign-in trickery.

In the settings app, there's one "master" iCloud login, and that's the one you have to use on all the devices you want to share an iCloud Photo Library. Both my wife's phone and my phone's "master" iCloud login is my Apple ID. But if you dig in to that login, under "iCloud", you can turn off and on individual iCloud services. On my wife's device, we have Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Messages, etc. all turned off.

Then in settings, you can navigate to those individual services, like the App store, and we log them in separately with my wife's Apple ID.

You can go to "Accounts" and add another account - where you add, for instance, a Gmail account - and on my wife's phone, we've added her iCloud account, and have activated Mail, Contact, Calendars, etc. for that account. So her phone's Contacts, Calendars, etc. all show her data, and not mine.

Messages and Facetime you'll be technically logged in as the same Apple ID - but in Settings/Messages and Settings/Facetime, you can turn off and on the individual phone numbers and email addresses that will reach your individual devices and "Start Conversations From". So part of our initial phone setup is to turn off the phone numbers and emails you don't want to ring on each device.

So it's possible. It just takes some extra setup and digging in the Settings app.

All this just so when my wife takes a picture and when I take a picture they both show up in the same iCloud Photo library. I thought for sure this was going to be the first feature Apple announced when Family Sharing came around. I don't know how it's been so many years and they never implemented a shared iCloud Photo Library.

 

[PhoenixDown]

You want to avoid using the same iCloud ID for both of you. Leads to issues.