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iCloud Shared Photo Library: Everything You Need to Know
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Sorry bout that, I’m new here. If I have 100 photos in my personal library, can I just share 50 photos?
Yes, You can add any number you want from your Personal Library to your Shared Library.
I just came back from a trip with my partner and I just enabled this shared library feature. I invited her, all set.
I took 600 photos and videos and we didn’t have good connectivity so it did the full upload this afternoon when we got back home. Now I selected the items to move, it takes ages, like a full upload again. Why is that? Shouldn’t it be a quick thing happening from the cloud side? It’s crazy.
It took 6 hours to upload all the pictures and now another 6 hours just to move them to the shared library?
Am I overseeing something?
Will they take double the space then? Why is it uploading it all again? It doesn’t make any sense at all
I took 600 photos and videos and we didn’t have good connectivity so it did the full upload this afternoon when we got back home. Now I selected the items to move, it takes ages, like a full upload again. Why is that? Shouldn’t it be a quick thing happening from the cloud side? It’s crazy.
It took 6 hours to upload all the pictures and now another 6 hours just to move them to the shared library?
Am I overseeing something?
Will they take double the space then? Why is it uploading it all again? It doesn’t make any sense at all
You are absolutely right. Sometimes I question the quality of the programmers that Apple (but also other companies) employ. Logically, every photo on iCloud should have a unique ID, just as every library should. Moving a photo should simply involve changing the library's ID associated with that photo, a process that should be almost instantaneous.
Similarly, I'm frustrated by the programmers' inability to facilitate the transfer of entire albums — including the album name and all associated photos — from my personal library to the shared library. I eagerly awaited the shared library feature for many years and was thrilled at its announcement. However, its inability to transfer all metadata rendered it useless for me.
Wow... Unbelievable. There is nothing left in the whole apple ecosystem that is practical and functional. This is bad.
I find moving photos between Personal and Shared Libraries instantaneous. When large numbers of photos are imported the upload download process can take a while, and is very variable.
If your partners has "Download Originals" set then yes their computer will use the same space for the Shared Library as your computer. Not double on same computer.
Lack of albums/folders in the Shared Library is a huge disappointment, and greatly diminishes the usefulness to my wife and I.
It took 6 hours for the full upload, which is ok, although I think they have very slow servers on their hand too because my connection isn’t exactly slow usually.
But apart from it, not it says moving to shared library and I have another extremely slow countdown of 660 photos, it’s taking hours. The phone is draining battery like crazy and it’s hot to touch.
This is poor coding, not that it surprises me anymore, but it’s really bad.
I have 16,000 photos, many of which are slides and prints I scanned-in in 2006 which means that without Albums in the shared library the feature is useless. Organising by date is useless. Took about an hour to transfer to shared library, then once we found out the albums were missing, another hour to move 16,000 back again!
AFAIK the transfer is done in the cloud, connection speed doesn’t come into it.
AFAIK the transfer is done in the cloud, connection speed doesn’t come into it.
The move on my hand is taking hours, her phone shows the same 9 pics in the shared library as yesterday when we didn’t have good connectivity.
My Mac shows more total piscires than my iPhone and I can see two photos I took the other day and deleted from my iPhone already. They should have never been synced at all.
It’s a disaster.
Thanks for taking your time to let me know your experience though!
I did the same with 80,000 photos when Shared Library was introduced. Apple wasn't really thinking of people like us with a large library of organised photos where the exif date does not match the event because of scans etc.
So we have carried on using Lightroom (cloudy) which does the same job much more satisfactorily, but costs £10 per month. I had hoped to leave Lightroom when Shared Library started.
iCloud Photos can be very frustrating and puzzling, but my experience is that it does eventually sort itself out. It just needs to be left alone sometimes for days.
About the speed of moving between Personal and Shared Libs, I said it was instantaneous for me which it is with the small daily number I am usually moving. I can't remember how long my 80000 transfer took when I did it.
Does anyone know how to upload mov files from an external hard drive to iCloud? I'm using iCloud for the first time and I'm only able to upload family photos from the hard drive and not videos even though the videos were recorded from iPhones over the years.
Are you using Apple's Photos app to manage your photos library? If so, you can import all the video files from the Photos app, and enable Photos app's iCloud Photo Library to upload and sync.
I went on the iCloud website through my MacBook Air M2 and I'm just dragging the photos to the album but for some reason when I drag videos to an album its not allowed.