How To Use the New iCloud Shared Photo Library

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost. com. Let's talk about the new iCloud Shared Photo Library feature.

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A new feature of iCloud and the Photos App on your devices is the iCloud Shared Photo Library. This is fundamentally different than sharing in other ways. Regular iCloud Photo Sharing is when you simply take a group of photos, put them online as a Gallery so that others can view them. Anybody that you give access to or you make it open to the general public. This actually allows you to have a whole shared library. Other people that you share with can edit the photos, arrange the photos, and delete the photos. The problem is solved when you and your family go on a trip or attend an event and everybody takes pictures on their different devices and then in order to see somebody else's pictures you have to share between each other. Air dropping photos back and forth and such. Now you can all have a Shared Library that all those photos go into and everybody can see everybody else's photos. So, for instance, you and your spouse can both take pictures with your iPhone and then both see those pictures in your library afterwards. It essentially gives you two iCloud libraries. Your Personal one and your Shared one. You can look at one or the other or a combined view of both of them. 

It is a complicated feature and it kind of has to be. There's a lot to consider here. For each photo does it go into Personal or does it go into Shared and what can each person do with shared photos. But once you get your head around all the features and use it for a little while it all makes sense. 

So first the requirements. You have to be using macOS Ventura or iPhone OS 16.1 or iPad OS 16.1. All those operating systems come with Photos version 8.0 which has the iCloud Shared Photo Library feature. Then, of course, you also need to be using iCloud Photo Library for this. So let's launch the Photos App and then I'm going to go to Photos, Settings. Now I'm already using iCloud Photo Library here. I have that turned On. The new option here is a whole separate part of Settings. Shared Library. Then I just click this button to get started. You can add participants. So you click the Plus button here and you simply add the person's name if they are in your Contacts or their Apple ID. So I'll add another demo account that I have here and Add. I can continue to add up to five others. Now I click Continue. 

Now to start with I get to choose four different options as to what to include in my Shared Photos Library. I can include Everything. Just put everything over there. So take all the photos out of my personal library and put them in the Shared Photo Library. I'll still have the same access to them as I did before. The other people that I'm sharing with will also have access to those. I can choose by People or Date or I can choose Manually to select individual photos or the fourth option is to just choose nothing. Click Move Photos Later and it will put nothing in your Shared Photo Library for now. So if I choose by People or Date and go to Next you can see it is going to automatically include the person I'm sharing with. In addition to that I can click Add Other People and choose Others that would normally appear under People and say I want to include that. So if you and your spouse want to have a Shared Library and you want to include your kids so that automatically all the photos that you've got in your library that have those kids in them will be part of your Shared Library you can do that. Or you can choose Manually and then you'll get all your photos here. You can Search, you can use items in the Sidebar here, whatever you want to do to select various photos. Of course you can Shift Click to select a range and all of that. So I'll just choose a bunch here at random and click Add. 

Now I can Preview the library. It will show me here what it is going to include and I'll Continue. Then I have to choose how to invite the other person. Do they get a Message or am I just going to Copy the Link and send it to them some other way. So I'll Click, Invite Via Messages and I get to customize the message if I want and Send. You can see I get the message over here on a different Mac that is signed into this demo account and I get to Join and do all the same things. I can choose which of my photos I want to include. I'm just going to click Move Photos Later in this case. 

So now with it turned On the new control that you've got here is at the top left. I've got Library selected here in the Sidebar. I can choose whether to view both libraries. So everything combined. Just my Personal library or just the Shared library photos. Most of the time you're probable going to want to use Both Libraries. Then you really don't see a difference. All the photos that are Shared with your family are going to be here along with all the photos not shared with your family. Everything looks normal. You do see this little icon here at the top right corner of any photos that are Shared. That's only on when you're viewing both libraries. When you are in Shared Library, of course, every single one is shared. When you're in Personal Library none of them are shared. If you want to move a photo from your Personal Library to Shared you can select it and then select Image and then Move One Photo to Shared Library. You can also Control Click and then select Move One Photo to Shared Library. Of course you can select multiple photos and do it for all of them at once. 

You can also, at any time, go back to Photo, Settings, Shared Library and add more participants. You can select to Remove a Participant. You can add more people to automatically be Shared. Then there is also a checkbox for Shared Library Suggestions which you will get from time to time here on the left. Suggestions as to what you might want to move from your Personal Library to your Shared Library. Now any photo that is Shared can be Edited including Adjustments, Filters, Cropping by anybody. Information can be changed like Captions, Key Words Added, Assigning Locations. All these things can be done by anybody that is part of the Shared Photo Library. In a sense you've got joint ownership over these photos. When you make changes they automatically sync to everybody else. 

Now albums aren't shared. Albums are just basically a playlist of photos. So if I were to select a bunch of photos here and create a new album with those, call it Test 1, that would be my album containing these four shared photos. Note that while viewing an album I can switch from Shared Library to Personal Library. I have no photos from my Personal Library in this album or both. If I were to go here to my library and be looking at both, maybe grab one that is only in my Personal Library and add it here. Now I see five photos and you could see now I get the little icon here telling me that four of these are Shared, one is Personal. But only I see this album. This is my album that I created. 

Now if you ever want to move something from Shared to Personal you can do that as well. You can select it. You can Control Click it or go to the Image Library here and you can move back to your Personal Library. So you can select any photo that you want and then get Info on it. One of the things you'll see when it is part of the Shared Library is information about who added it. So what happens when somebody Deletes a photo from iCloud Shared Library? Well, first of all it moves to the Recently Deleted folder. So it is now instantly gone. Second, whoever originally shared it will have the option to move it back to their Personal Library. So if you shared something and somebody else deletes it you can still get it back into your Personal Library. There's also a Setting in here for Deletion Notifications. So other people will see that the photo was deleted and the notification will include the option for them to move it to their Personal Library as well. 

So what happens if the creator of the Library decides to delete the Shared Library like here. Well, you can see here they get to keep everything. Move it all to their Personal Library or only what they contributed. Others would get the same option as well as long as they have been participating in the Shared Library for more than 7 days. If not they just get to keep what they contributed. But if it has been more than seven days they can also choose to keep everything and move it all to their Personal Library. 

What happens if you have a device that isn't using iOS 16.1 or macOS Ventura. Well, you would just see things that are in your Personal iCloud Library. You wouldn't see things that have been moved into the Shared Library at all. But that would just be for that older device. 

Now when using an iPhone with this the Camera App has some special features to go along with iCloud Shared Photo Libraries. So first go into the Settings App and then go down to Camera Settings. So you find all the way down here, not Photos but Camera. Go in there and then there is a new item here Shared Library if you've got iCloud Shared Photo Library turned On. Then you see here you can turn On, Sharing Directly From the Camera. So you take a new picture from your iPhone and it can go to the Shared Library if you want. You can Share Automatically. If you do that your iPhone is going to use BlueTooth and is going to recognize when another person you're sharing with is nearby. In other words their iPhone is close. In other words you and your spouse are together. You take a photo with your iPhone. That photo will automatically go into your Shared Library instead of your Personal Library. You also have the option here Share When At Home. So it will recognize whether you're located at Home and whether or not the other person is there. It will automatically go into your Shared Library if you have that turned On. You can also set it to Share Manually. When you do that, in the Camera App you'll find this little button up here. Tap that and it shows Shared Library. So now with that turned On the photo you take will automatically go to your Shared Library. Tap it again and now the photo you take will go to your Personal Library. So you can decide before you take the photo which Library it goes to. Of course, regardless of which one you choose you can still go to the Photos App. So you can see here some photos are in Shared Library and some photos are Personal Library and you can tap and hold on a photo and you can Move to Shared Library right here. 

There are some special things to consider. You can invite people into the iCloud Shared Photo Library regardless of whether or not they are part of Family Sharing. However, if they are under 13 years old then they must be part of your Family Sharing Group. iCloud storage for the entire Shared Library is from the creator of the library. So probably the family member with the best iCloud plan, if you're not all sharing an iCloud Plan, should be the one to create the Shared Library.

Note that the Favorites Album is shared when you have a Shared Library. So, for instance, on the other computer here I'm going to Favorite some photos. Then you'll see those get favored here and of course I would see them now listed here under Favorites. If you want to see which photos are shared by which people you can select a photo shared by somebody else, get the information on them, and you'll see Added By. You can click there and it will do a search and you can see Shared By. Go into that and you'll see all the photos shared by that individual. 

While this is a complex feature it is fairly easy to try and then back out of if you want to. For instance you can set it up with no photos in there originally and just share a handful and then see how that works. See how it feels to have it and add more as you go along. You can always select All the Photos here and then move them back to your Personal Library if you want. If you want to read about all the tiny little details Apple has this webpage right here with all this information about different aspects of using the iCloud Shared Photo Library. 

So really there is a wide range of ways you can use this. On one extreme you and say your spouse can have all of your photos shared. So you just have one big shared library between you. On the other extreme is everybody has their own Personal photos and only a small number of photos are put in this Shared Library. Maybe even just photos from a recent event or trip for a limited time. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.