Why Shared Albums and Sharing Photos Aren't the Same Thing
THE MOST MISUNDERSTOOD FEATURE OF APPLE PHOTOS
If you had to pick a single reason why mobile photography has become embedded in 21st century life, it is the ease with which we can share a photo.
Why share the news when you can share the experience itself?
Photo sharing has become so straightforward that you can launch the Camera App right in Messages to share that first step/sunset/selfie/concert/beach moment before it’s even a fully formed memory. Images have become our second language. Or maybe the first.
But you can only add so many attachments to an email or Message before it gets unwieldy, and those apps aren’t the best way to view and organize photos anyway.
Why share the news when you can share the experience itself?
In 2015, when Photos replaced iPhoto, Apple introduced iCloud Photo Sharing. What we now know as Shared Albums. The idea was to include a feature in Photos to easily share a whole story of images in a convenient full featured space. The launch of iCloud made that possible. For reasons we’ll get to in a minute.
I’ll be honest. Back in the day I wasn’t very excited about Shared Albums. The presentation was messy. A mosaic of shared photos and videos that couldn’t be sorted or searched on. It felt very un-Apple like and random.
It was awkward getting friends and family on board. And when they did, they assumed Shared Albums was like a download tool where I was getting the original photo files. If I asked for an Original sized photo for a large print or book cover, they’d be confused about why I didn’t just use the Shared Album version. We’ll get to THAT in a minute, too.
But the thing was, Shared Albums did do what it promised. It was a tech-friendly way to easily share images online in one place and have it accessible in Apple Photos, just like all your other pictures. No digging through emails. It broadened and consolidated your picture experience right in the Photos App.
When my daughter had a semester abroad, she posted photos from her trip and we could enjoy her experience. When our son taught at an English boarding school one year, he shared pictures of his little town and a tour of Scotland while on break. We got to see the view out his cottage window, and his flight in a biplane over the moors. I don’t think that would have happened as timely or complete if attached to a series of emails.
Well, 10 years have improved Shared Albums in several important ways and the OS upgrades coming this Fall will make them even more useable and fun. Ready for prime time, as they say. If only for one thing.
The name.
Shared Albums are just web galleries with a shortcut in Apple Photos
I think naming the feature “Shared Albums” has created a lot of unnecessary confusion. “Shared Galleries” would have been more clear, because that’s exactly what Shared Albums are. “Albums” implies a collection of pictures close at hand; particularly when in the Photos sidebar next the the Albums section that we create from our Library of images. It seems to say “you’ve got this” when you really don’t.
When you select a group of photos and use the Share button to create a new Shared Album, this is what happens:
Photos identifies the pictures to add to the new Shared Album.
Photos tells iCloud you want to make a new Shared Album from the selected pictures.
iCloud prompts you for a Shared Album name and for who you want to invite.
iCloud asks you if the invitees can also add photos and comment on photos.
iCloud offers to make a Public Link that you can share to anyone who may not be an Apple user with their own iCloud.
iCloud optimizes and posts the selected pictures to the Shared Album that it hosts on your iCloud Drive.
iCloud creates a shortcut to that web gallery that shows up as a Shared Album in your device’s Apple Photos.
It looks like it’s right there in your Photos Library, but it’s really not.
So why does that matter?
Well, first of all, Shared Albums requires iCloud. Because the photos/videos you add to your Shared Album are being shared from your iCloud Photos Library, not from your device. Your iPhone/Mac Photos Library just orders up the service, it doesn’t actually deliver it. Then, iCloud is the web host for that Shared Album . . . gallery. So that anyone with an internet connection can access it if invited or if they have the link URL.
Second, your Shared Albums are independent of your personal Photos Library. In other words, if you post, say, a dozen photos to a Shared Album, and you then delete those photos in your library, the Shared Album collection remains intact. The Shared Album is a standalone collection, just like other web gallery services. Kind of a series spin-off to your Photos ecosystem. Like Mork & Mindy.
I digress.
Shared Albums are not a replacement for your Photos Library
This anomaly hasn’t gone unnoticed. And it’s spawned more than one advice post/video that suggests using Shared Albums as a space-saver hack. That you can recreate your Photos Library as Shared Albums and delete the originals from your iPhone, saving a lot of storage space on your device.
That’s kind of like keeping the Cliffs Notes and tossing Lord of the Rings.
Web galleries are built around a primary purpose; sharing a visual collection of images online as easily as possible, usually with some measure of privacy and interaction. In the case of Shared Albums, that plays out as 4 things.
Ease of creation by making it part of iCloud Photos Library
Ease of access by offering direct integration with other Apple Photos users
Ease of delivery by using optimized images for faster delivery online
Ease of navigation by offering minimal features - comments, chronological sort
It’s the last 2 features that really kill the notion of Shared Albums as a replacement for Apple Photos Library.
The iPhone 16 Pro can create an 8064 x 6048 pixel image; over 48 megapixels. Shared Album photos are Optimized - downsized - to a maximum of 2048 pixels on the long side. 5400 pixels for panoramas. Or around 3 megapixels. For the web and for a physical print up to about 6x9 inches, this is fine.
You can load a Shared Album of several hundred images without spinning beachballs and the photos look good. But you are throwing away a lot of information in each image to get there. In no way does it meet the criteria of sharing an Original image file. If that’s important to you.
Shared Albums use downsized copies of your photos that speed up viewing on the web
You’re also giving up most of the functionality you get in a Photos Library. Shared Albums are a scrollable viewing platform. Superb for following along with a trip or the growth of a young one or the timeline of an event. You can make comments. You can download (if permitted) and even add photos of your own, for a collaborative experience. But you can’t create sub-albums, search, or edit.
So in no way are Shared Albums a replacement for the Apple Photos Library, and if someone suggests otherwise, give them a wide berth.
But what about the intended purpose, simply sharing a peek at your life with other people.
Frankly, I’ve been less than supportive of Shared Albums for a long time, and have always steered people away from it as a top tier solution for collaborative sharing. The confusion about how it fits into the Apple Photos Ecosystem and the image quality thing bugs the photographer in me. I still recommend that photos sharing is best done with iCloud Links or AirDrop to pass on image files.
But with the redesign of Apple Photos, I’m rethinking my position. Times have changed, expectations have evolved, and Apple has finally given the feature a little love.
Shared Albums have new features coming in iOS 26
Based on the beta releases of iOS 26, the look and feel of Shared Albums comes very close to that of the new Album experience with both photo and movie (slideshow) view, re-sharing, copy and paste, square or full aspect image views, sorting control, and more. And a big thing is that Apple Photos tags Shared Albums photos with who originally contributed them, so you can always backtrack to the source if you need to request an original file. When you download someone’s photo, that name stays with it as it does with all shared images now.
And as for the quality thing, I’ll take the road where ease-of-use trumps perfection in most cases. In a world where probably 99% of images will never be ink on paper, a nice full screen image is all you need and 2048 pixels gets you pretty close.
So Shared Albums promises a more Album-like look and feel. Some new sort and viewing features. And better transparency for a photo’s source. It finally feels like Apple Photos Lite.
Would I choose it to share photo files for a project? Well, given the choice, I’d prefer to send them using iCloud Links.
But as a visual conversation with people I love, Shared Albums is ready to share!
Do you use Apple’s Shared Albums? What do you love about it? What doesn’t work? Who do you share with and why?
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