Creating Quick Online Photo Galleries

You can quickly and easily create a website photo gallery using the Photos app on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. You can simply make it public and share the URL with your friends and family. Once the gallery is created, you can easily add more photos to it.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: With summer coming a lot of us have trips planned and when we go on trips we take photos. It would be nice to share those with people back home, around the world. For years and years we've been able to just post photos galleries online with all different sorts of websites. Apple has had various functionalities in iPhoto and now Photos to do that. It's really quick and easy. If you just want to post some photos that anybody can see you can create a shared gallery. It's part of iCloud. 
Here I am in the Photos app on the Mac. I'm just going to select a few photos to get started. Say I just want to share these. I can add more photos and get rid of others later. This is just to get started. Now I'm going to go to File and then Share and then choose iCloud Photo Sharing. On the right here it's going to ask me to choose an album and I can add comments as well. Now I don't have any shared albums created yet so I'm going to hit the Plus button here to create one and I'm going to give it a name.
I can Invite people. Inviting people will help me create a private gallery. You have to have an Apple ID to sign onto your account and you have to match one of these Apple ID's I'm going to add here. But let's talk about just creating a simple easy public one. So I'm just entering a name. I'm not doing anything else and hit Create. It's going to create this.
On the left here I see Shared, Shared Albums and there's one album. I can go in and see the six photos I've added. Now I can easily add more photos to this. I can go to Photos and I can just drag and drop. Let's drag and drop this one and just put it right in there. Now when I go there you can see it's going to update and add the seventh photo to it in a minute here. Then I'll have seven in this gallery. There it goes.
Now how do I share this with people? When I'm viewing the shared album here I can click on this little button and it shows me the name of the shared album. I can change that. I can invite more people. But I can also click on Public Website. This just creates this URL here and I can copy and paste that into anything. Into email, post on Facebook, text message, whatever I want. I can post it to my website. People can actually use this link, I'll just double click on it to go to it here, and here's what it look like in Safari. This will actually work in any web browser. It works on Chrome, Internet Explorer, on Windows computers, on mobile devices. 
This is just an iCloud little website and you can view the photos, you can click on a photo to go into it, you can flip through them like a slideshow, download photos, all sorts of things. It works like a pretty full featured  photo gallery that, you know, something that's been on the internet for a long time. 
The great thing about this is it is easy to use, easy to setup, and it's free as part of your iCloud account. Of course it's using space on your iCloud but we all get 5G for free. So if you're not using much of that just a few photos is barely going to touch that and it will be easy to put these up. You can take it down whenever you want. You can see I can select, and Control click here, and delete that shared album when I want. I can also go to the Settings button here and I can turn off public website, for instance, for it. All sorts of things.
So it's a quick and easy way to just share a bunch of photos with people. The great thing about this though is once you've created it you can continue to add photos to it.  So as I take more photos I can drag and drop more photos into this shared album. It will update automatically. I can do that from my Mac but I can also do it from my iPhone or iPad. 
You can do that same thing from your iPhone here. So I'll go into Photos and I'm going to go down to Shared at the bottom. See, there's the trip photos I created there. I can hit the Plus button here and add new photos that way. Or I can add them just as I would add them to any album. So I can be reviewing the photos and then say add them to the trip photos album. 
I can easily update this from my iPhone. In addition to that if I go up to the top level here of Shared there's a Plus button and I can create a new Shared Album right from my iPhone. If I'm only taking my iPhone with me on a trip and I didn't set this album up in advance on my Mac I can just create it for the first time here on my iPhone and start sharing here. 
So I will call this one Trip 2, go to Next, I'm not going to add anybody to that invitation list, but instead I'm going to go into Trip 2, I haven't even added any photos here yet, but at the bottom you can see it says Photos and People. Hit People and you can see there's that same public website option. Now I get a link there at the bottom. I even have a Share Link button and I can copy it or, you know, send it in an email just like that. So it's just as easy to setup on the iPhone or iPad as it is to do on the Mac. Since it's iCloud it can then be updated from any of those devices.
Keep in mind that you do need to have iCloud, of course, turned on. If you look in the iCloud settings under Photos there's an option to turn on or off iCloud Photo Sharing. It's on by default. Make sure you have that turned on or none of these options will show up.

Comments: 7 Responses to “Creating Quick Online Photo Galleries”

Owen

7 years ago

I title photographs so that a viewer can have an idea of what they are looking at, who, what, when, where. But as soon as they are added to a shared album all title, keyword information disappears. Really a stupid "feature". Surely there is some way around this.

Dan McNeil

One of the best MacMost tips you’ve done. Thanks.

Annemarie Godston

What a great idea!!!! But, how do I send it? There's no place to click "send".
Annemarie Godston

Gary Rosenzweig

Annemarie: I show you right around 4:50.

Kym

Thanks Gary, solved a problem for me. Can others add to the album, ie those who click in the link?

Kym: Not set up the way it is in this video. You'd have to add them as users by inviting them with their Apple ID, and then set up the shared album to allow them to truly share the album. Investigate all of the options and you'll see.

Bill Sinclair

Brilliant! Thanks Gary.

Comments Closed.

Creating Quick Online Photo Galleries

Comments: 7 Responses to “Creating Quick Online Photo Galleries”

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