Sharing Photos Online From Your Mac

You can share photos online using the Photos app on your Mac and iCloud. Others can view it on a public website on in their Photos app. You can also make the album private and allow others to add photos and comments to the album.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to share photos from your Mac with other people online.
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So if you want to share some of your photos with other people online you don't have to upload them to some sort of social network or photo sharing site. You can do it using the Photos app on your Mac and iCloud. So here I am in Photos. What I want to do is create a Shared Album. Now I can do that in many ways. I can go over here to the Shared Albums on the left. Click the Plus button and create a Shared Album that way. But it's easier if I start off by selecting some photos even if they are not all the photos I want to share. Just a few to get started. So I've selected a few photos here. Now I can go to File, Share and choose Shared Albums. Or I can simply click the Share button here at the top and select Shared Albums. Either way I'm going to get this popping up here under the Shared icon. Now I need to select the Shared Album that I want to use. In this case I haven't created one yet. So I have the ability here to create a new Shared Album. I'll give it a name. Let's just call this Test. I can invite people to it. But I won't do that just yet. I'm just going to create the album right now. So I'll click Create and you can see it appear here under Shared Albums. If I select it here you could see there are the six photos I've included in the Shared Album. 
Now to control how this is shared I'm going to click this button up here and I'll see the name. I can change that if I want. Here's where I can now invite people and I have three options. So when inviting people you need to use somebody's Apple ID. They can have an Apple ID because they have any Apple product or they can go to appleid.apple.com and create one for free. You don't have to own an Apple product to do that. Anybody with an Apple ID can be added to this invite list and then they'll have private access to it. They would need to be logged into their account in their web browser. They can be doing this on any device that has a modern web browser. They don't need to have a Mac or iPhone or iPad. This allows you to control exactly who sees the photos to keep them private just among a select group of people. Now when you've invited people if you have Subscribers Can Post set then they can post photos to the album as well. So it's truly a Shared Album. The way they would do this is to accept the invitation they are going to get, they're going to get a notification, and then in their Photos app under Shared Albums they would see this album as well. They can add photos to it in the Photos app. So if you went on a trip with a bunch of people you can create one of these, put some of your favorite photos there, and other people can then add their favorite photos to it as well. You can all view them in the same Shared Album. However if you want to make this just an album that you're sharing with people and they can't add their own photos then uncheck this.
Now next you have the ability to make this a public website. When I select this I'll get a URL that will appear here with a link. You could see it here. Now it's unlikely anybody is going to find this unless you post a link to it somewhere. So this is pretty private as well although not secured. But the advantage of this is you can send anybody this link and they'll be able to go and view the album either in the Photos app, if they have an Apple product, or in any web browser. So instead of messing around with inviting people using their Apple ID you could simply check this, then copy and paste this link into an email or text message and send it to friends so that they can see the photos that you posted. 
The last checkbox here is simply for notifications. When you share this with people they can add comments, they could Like and if you check this box here they can add their own photos. With this checked you get a notification when that happens. So let's leave these two options on to share an album that nobody else can change. We just want to share our photos with everybody so they can see them. Let's say you sent this link to people. Here's what they would then see as they try to go to it in their web browser. You could see it displays here in Safari but it works in Chrome, it will work in Microsoft Edge, it will work on an android phone. Anywhere. It will display the photos and they could scroll through them. There are options as well. They could click on a photo and they go into that photo, depending upon their browser. They could go full screen with it. They could Flip between photos or start a slide show that automatically goes between the photos. They could also click Download and download this photo. They don't have to screenshot it or drag the photo out or anything like that. Notice here I'm not logged into iCloud. I don't have to have an Apple ID to do this. This is basically a publicly shared photo gallery. It's yours! You have control of it. It's not at some social network or some third party site. Back here in the Photos app you can delete it anytime using the Delete Shared Album button here and it goes away. 
Now once you have a Shared Album you could easily add photos or remove photos from it. So, let's go back to our Library here and let's say we want to add this one to it. Just drag and drop it and now it added that one to the album. You also can click this button here and then it will allow you to select photos to add. So I can select a couple here like that, Add, and now those are added as well. If I want to delete a photo I can select it and I can either Control Click on it and Delete from the Shared Album or just use the Delete key and it will delete it from the Shared Album. It's still in my regular Photos Library. It's just not shared anymore in this Shared Album. 
Also note that you can add comments and Like photos in Shared Albums. So there's a button here at the bottom left hand corner. It looks a little differently on the iPhone or iPad. It actually says Add Comments at the bottom. Here I can Like a photo like this and I can add a comment. Other people can do that as well. So if you shared this with other people and they open it up in their Photos app they have this same button here and they can click there and add a comment as well. Everybody else who is viewing the Shared Album can click and see the comments that other people have posted. Notice you have to be at the top level here to have this button and be able to change settings for the entire album. Let's set this so subscribers can post and let me invite someone. So now that person has accepted and you could see the list of people here and the checkmark next to the people who have accepted. I could remove them from the album if I want. If I go in here and look at the comments I can see when they do things. For instance if they Like the photo you'll see that appear here. You also see it when they add a comment. You get a Notification as well because I have that checked. You'll also see it when they add a comment to the photo as well. So you can see here they just added one. It updated live. I'm going to have that other user add a photo to the album. You're going to see it appear here. There it goes. So that's a photo there and I can actually go in and comment on that photo. 
Now here's what happens if somebody invites me to view their Shared Album. You can see I got a Notification here. I'll click on that. It goes into Photos and under Shared Albums you may have noticed there's Activity there. Activity is where I'll see the invitation. So there it says Album Test 2. I can Accept or Decline. I'll accept. Now Test 2 appears here. I can go to it and see the photos that that person has posted to the Shared Album. If they have allowed me to add my own photos I can do so. Otherwise I could always go in and Comment and Like their photos as well. 
Well, let's say they just share a public link instead. Then I would get a message from them or maybe an email or something. Here it is with a link. I could click on that and I could go and view the album in a web browser, even if I haven't been added to the invite list. You know you can share these public albums with anybody. So you could post them to social media and instead of uploading your photos there you could simply post to your Facebook page that here are all the photos from your trip. Check it out. The great thing is you can easily update this as well. So you could do this while you're on the trip constantly adding new photos to the Shared Album. Those that are interested can keep checking the Shared Album and see what's new. You can also share photos with the general public. You could put a link on a website, for instance, and say here are some of my favorite photos and let anybody check out an album that you've shared. There are so many options that you can really customize iCloud Shared Photo Albums to fit almost any need for posting photos online.

Comments: 13 Responses to “Sharing Photos Online From Your Mac”

Michael

4 years ago

My Mac says that I need to change the iCloud setting in order to share but doesn't tell me how

Gary Rosenzweig

Michael: What is the exact message and where do you see it?

William Nixon

My Mac tells me:- "cannot create shared album" Please advise what I must do to overcome this. Thank you

William: In Photos, Preferences, iCloud is Shared Albums checked?

Steve

So if someone doesn't have an AppleID, is there any way to allow them to upload photos to a shared album?

Ed Adams

Great hint, wish you had posted it 2 years ago as I have been trying to use google photos to share images. 3 questions - 1st. Does this album count against my iCloud storage? I have seen people say yes and people say no. It doesn’t seem to as I have not seen an increase after I set up shared albums. 2nd - if I have a public album can I set it so people can't download it? 3rd - Is there a limit to the number of images - again I have heard 5,000. thank you

Ed: Shared albums don't count against your storage limit, but in most cases you have that photo in iCloud Photos anyway, in your regular library. No, you can't set it so people can't download. Even if Apple took away the download button, the very nature of putting things online makes them available (they would be part of the web page). Yes, there is a limit. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299

Gene

I assume that this works for videos too?

Gene: Yes. Try it.

Carol S

But as far as I can tell, there is still no way for me to share from photos unless I cave in and use Apple's Mail instead of gmail. With an entire family of Mac users who use gmail, I'm just not going to go back to Apple's Mail. Is there a workaround so I can send or share photos using gmail? The Chrome box won't check.

Carol: You can use almost any email system you like. The Mail app and other apps don't care which kind of account you have. Just add your Gmail account as an account on your Mac (in the Mail app).

Joan

3 years ago

Hi Gary, thanks for another good video. Question - what is the diff between a shared album and iCloud link besides the 30 day time limit on the link and I guess, how it was generated? Since both can be shared with a link to the public is the difference an album can be added to and a link cannot? Thank you! joan

Joan: Yes, the time limit and "how it was generated" is the difference. There's no need to make an album, just a quick way to share it.

Comments Closed.

Sharing Photos Online From Your Mac

Comments: 13 Responses to “Sharing Photos Online From Your Mac”

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