Can photos go to a different iCloud account?

[cjvv]

Does iOS 14 add any flexibility around using a different iCloud account for Photos vs. everything else?

I’ve been sharing an iCloud account with my wife so we can both see all the family photos without doing anything (like manually sharing photos to the Family album). But her Messages are filling up her phone and since her iMessage uses a different Apple ID, iOS refuses to offload her messages to iCloud.

 

[Shirasaki]

There’s no such option for enabling iCloud photos on a separate iCloud account. You can only turn off iCloud photos.

 

[Small White Car]

I have a dropbox account for family photos for specifically this reason. If they ever implemented your idea I might look into iCloud photos, but until then, other services are your only solution.

 

[inkahauts]

Or sync your photos to say amazon prime and you both share a prime account login and then your photos are all backed up in two clouds...

It’s really not too hard to just select an entire day or even week or month and just share them to a family shared album either... you have to remember to do it though and thatd be a pain.

 

[zorinlynx]

I so often see people wanting to use iCloud Photos this way. It blows my mind because it just doesn't make sense to me.

Just create a shared album, and dump family photos there periodically. It's really easy to do and the nice thing is the shared albums don't count towards your iCloud storage usage.

I have a bunch of shared albums for various things, like "Family photos", "Cat photos", etc... The nice thing is you can just send the best photos to those albums and keep them from cluttering up everyone's photos. For example, if I shared my entire iCloud Photo Library with family, I'm sure they'd complain about how many random photos of tech there are since I use my phone to document stuff at work a lot. Sure, I delete them regularly but sometimes they pile up.

 

[bradbomb]

The only issue with shared albums is the photos in there are not full res.

How to use Shared Albums in Photos on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac - Apple Support

Share photos and videos easily with Shared Albums.

support.apple.com

“When shared, photos are reduced to 2048 pixels on the long edge, except panoramic photos, which can be up to 5400 pixels wide. You can share GIFs that are 100MB or smaller.”

 

[Small White Car]

I so often see people wanting to use iCloud Photos this way. It blows my mind because it just doesn't make sense to me.

Just create a shared album, and dump family photos there periodically. It's really easy to do and the nice thing is the shared albums don't count towards your iCloud storage usage.

But you see how you've now created a chore that everyone has to do?

Computers should make our lives easier, not harder. Telling my family "here's something else you have to do" is not a winning plan. As the controller of the family's digital media they will (rightfully) conclude that I'm just pushing my job off onto them.

And, philosophies aside, I know it won't ever happen. So it's irrelevant if it makes sense or not. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.