Currently in the new Photos app, you can create an album out of your photos, and it is available to you on your iOS device, Mac and even on iCloud.com.
If you want to then share that album with anyone, you have to create a brand new album via the "iCloud Photo Sharing" sharing option, adding all the same photos in manually again.
This becomes an entirely separate album from the original one. If you want to add or remove photos, you have to do it separately in each copy of the album. The album name also becomes listed twice, once in the shared albums section of Photos and the other in the normal albums section.
I don't understand why Apple have chosen this route. It makes life much harder to manage. Just because I want to share an album does not mean I want to create an entirely separate distinct copy of it that requires managing in addition to the existing album. I just want to give access to my album to people.
Contrast this with Google+'s method which is far superior: you have a single concept of an album that by default is available only to you. You can then grant access to individuals via their google account, and they get to see it, and it shows up in your albums page when they view your profile. You can also generate a sharing code for the album which you can send to anyone who doesn't have a google account.
I get the feeling Apple have just built out the sharing functionality in isolation to the existing album functionality, perhaps by different teams. One route would have involved re-writing the existing album functionality to 'bake-in' sharing, while the other could just be created in isolation by a different team and bolted on, which is what it feels like. But what do I know.
Has anyone else felt this way? It just feels really clunky and highlights, in my humble opinion, Apple's immaturity when it comes to delivering truly fluid cloud services.
If you want to then share that album with anyone, you have to create a brand new album via the "iCloud Photo Sharing" sharing option, adding all the same photos in manually again.
This becomes an entirely separate album from the original one. If you want to add or remove photos, you have to do it separately in each copy of the album. The album name also becomes listed twice, once in the shared albums section of Photos and the other in the normal albums section.
I don't understand why Apple have chosen this route. It makes life much harder to manage. Just because I want to share an album does not mean I want to create an entirely separate distinct copy of it that requires managing in addition to the existing album. I just want to give access to my album to people.
Contrast this with Google+'s method which is far superior: you have a single concept of an album that by default is available only to you. You can then grant access to individuals via their google account, and they get to see it, and it shows up in your albums page when they view your profile. You can also generate a sharing code for the album which you can send to anyone who doesn't have a google account.
I get the feeling Apple have just built out the sharing functionality in isolation to the existing album functionality, perhaps by different teams. One route would have involved re-writing the existing album functionality to 'bake-in' sharing, while the other could just be created in isolation by a different team and bolted on, which is what it feels like. But what do I know.
Has anyone else felt this way? It just feels really clunky and highlights, in my humble opinion, Apple's immaturity when it comes to delivering truly fluid cloud services.