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iCloud Shared Photo Library: Everything You Need to Know

does anyone know if in the next release you will be able to see the shared photos in iCloud.
since adding all of my photos to shared photos they have all gone from I cloud and only items in my personal photos are there.

Very silly to remove them from I cloud.
 
zorinlynx said:
Yeah. If you have large photo library that you care about, you should have at least one Mac syncing it with "Optimize Mac Storage" turned off so it has a complete copy of the photo library. Then, back up that Mac with Time Machine.

Don't trust iCloud (or any other cloud provider) completely with your data.
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This happened to me also they do not show up on iCloud.com
 
mrsparks1990 said:
does anyone know if in the next release you will be able to see the shared photos in iCloud.
since adding all of my photos to shared photos they have all gone from I cloud and only items in my personal photos are there.

Very silly to remove them from I cloud.
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I believe they show up in beta.icloud.com already, so I am sure the final version the will show in iCloud.com.
 
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Two questions, both about favorites:

1) I use my "favorites" for things like my Apple Watch watchface. Will I be able to show favorites from both libraries together, or only one?

2) Will the favorites be shared by everyone in the library? IE: One person favorites a photo, does it become favorited by everyone or just that person?
 
Hi, if I choose to “Share All” photos (say with my wife) when setting this up initially, will that also put “Shared with me” photos in the shared library? That would make some photos redundant since the “Shared with me” are usually from texts with my wife!
 
Hi all, My wife and I moved our photos to the shared library. Until now, we used to send our photos each other via AirDrop, so we should have tons of duplicates to merge. In my Duplicates album I can see just 6 duplicates and my wife about 150, do you think the duplicates finding needs more time? We have just completed the sync operations…
 
Mike Boreham said:
...

Sharing a Library which starts with few or no photos, it makes sense not to include folders and albums. Let everyone create their own if they want to, don't impose an organisation.
...
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Mike, appreciate all your input on this topic. I think your situation is similar to mine. My wife and I have our own Apple ID and share iCloud storage. I only care about sharing with my wife. I've got about 20K photos (~130 GB) that I've kept many different places over the years including Lightroom and various storage devices (SAN, external SSD, etc). Moved everything to Photos about a year ago, on HD because of performance. Decided to go to iCloud. Pretty much starting from scratch. So when I get MacOS 16 plan to create one shared library on iCloud and import several Photos Libraries into it hoping duplicate elimination works well! Don't plan on having our own Photos Libraries. Then together we'll work on pruning and organizing the shared one.

Hope you're still around when I start :)
 
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Looks like after we share photos in shared library and if you have “download originals” then it is downloading every file on your iPhone which is taking iphone space. Doesn’t look right but that’s how apple implemented.
 
iGianluca said:
Yes, you can create new albums, personal or shared.
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Thanks for the information! I suppose you also can create folders in the shared library? It's just a pitty that's it seems your existing folder/album structure is not visible for the other participants if you change your personal library to the shared library. With over 60k photos and 500 existing albums/folders, I really would have hoped that it would sync it to the shared library.
 
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I really hope they add support for multiple Shared Libraries in a future release. As it stands I essentially need 2 shared libraries (one with my SO and one with my parents) which I can‘t have. They could add the customization features of the Reminders app to Shared Libraries, allowing us to design an icon & name each library (similar to Reminders Lists) to differentiate them.
 
iGianluca said:
Yes, you can create new albums, personal or shared.
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OK so this shared photo library seems to be exactly what my wife and I have been wanting for years. I’m slightly confused about the album issue though.

  • I get that I can create a shared photo library and invite my wife. Great.
  • I get that we can both choose which of our photos are put into the shared library and which photos stay in our personal photo library. Also great.
  • I get that if either of us delete a photo that’s been added into the shared library, that the originator of the phot gets a notification and can save it back into their personal library. Again, great.
But albums confuse me a little. They can’t be shared as part of the shared photo library. Understood. But does that mean that within our respective views of the shared photo library, my wife and I can create our own albums to organise the photos per our own personal preferences? Have I interpreted that correctly? Fine if so. I’d rather not have a massive shared library with no albums to organise it for ease of use. If we have to create our own albums that’s fine.
 
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interbear said:
But albums confuse me a little. They can’t be shared as part of the shared photo library. Understood. But does that mean that within our respective views of the shared photo library, my wife and I can create our own albums to organise the photos per our own personal preferences? Have I interpreted that correctly? Fine if so. I’d rather not have a massive shared library with no albums to organise it for ease of use. If we have to create our own albums that’s fine.
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Yes, you can place photos from the shared library into albums in the same way you can from your personal library. You can even have both in the same album, and they'll appear the same way they do in the main timeline, with a shared library badge (if you've toggled it on), and the ability to filter to see either only personal photos, or only shared photos.

You're correct that the albums won't be shared, but you can each create your own albums the same way you always could. For all intents and purposes, photos from the shared library act just like photos in your own library for that purpose.

To be clear, since it's a bit confusing now, "Shared Albums" work just like they always have. They have nothing to do with the new Shared Photo Libraries.
 
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So like many others in this thread, my wife and I each have our separate library that contain 80% of the same photos. When we initiate the shared library will the new duplicate detection work on the shared library?
 
TheCheapGeek said:
So like many others in this thread, my wife and I each have our separate library that contain 80% of the same photos. When we initiate the shared library will the new duplicate detection work on the shared library?
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It did in the early betas. But has stopped working. I think they turned it off. In our case it dumped both copies in the trash for tons of photos.
 
rick987611 said:
It did in the early betas. But has stopped working. I think they turned it off. In our case it dumped both copies in the trash for tons of photos.
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Oh no, that is sub optimal. The duplicate detection has worked perfectly on a solo library for me at least.
 
Would shared library be an easy way to share 2tb icloud space (for photos) with someone not part of your family?
 
Bhy said:
Dumb question: what if I want to save the pic in the shared library and my personal library? I think the shared library is supposed to be the original pic, but I want to use both?

Thinking this would be easier to share travel pics with the same group of friends that I always share with.
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After going through how this works, why can't this auto-share functionality be implemented into all shared albums? My shared album is used up for my household, but if I go out with friends, I'd like this functionality, also.

I think google photos already has this functionality.
 
hj8ag said:
Is there a way to restore deleted items in a shared library?

Also any way (toggle) to stop other users deleting images? I.e. only the host can delete pics?
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I think so.

You could look in “recently deleted” and you would then have a chance to recover the photos. My deleted photos hand around in recently deleted for about 30 days, I think you can set the time limit on that as well.

Also - I think you can set it up to receive a notification if someone deletes anything.

I’ll admit that this has some complications, but finally after many years I’m hoping our household can share thousands of photos. A solution was needed and now we finally get it. I’ll do a big offline backup of our 120,000 photos first and then we shall see if we get any disasters or if this new feature turns out to be good. Hoping for the best!
 
still not sure how this is better than the previous/current method of just creating a shared album?
doesn't is essentially just do the same thing but with iCloud share library being more overly complex?
 
....I feel like I'm too stupid to really understand this thouroughly or how to use it and its full benefits..at least for me anyway..I also am surprised you cant have different albums. Seems super common to have one to share with your wife/fam and a separate one with parents

I think I can see how this would be helpful if we had a kid or something. But I think shared albums does what we want. We put any trip/event pics in separate albums and share them with parents. I doubt any of them wants 1300 pictures showing up in their photos album, or is it a separate tab/album they probably won't see anyway? I'm just not sure how to really take advantage of this. I do wish shared albums were full quality...
 
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Mike Boreham said:
Moving photos between Personal and Shared is no more difficult than dragging them into a shared album. You can automate it so that all photos automatically go into the Shared Library by default. Individuals can opt out of it happening automatically.
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This does't seem true. There is no extra icon or folder for the "Shared Library" to drag things too. I still can't see how to move photos from my old Shared Album to the new Shared Library but I can't work out how to do it. There should be a wizard to simply "upgrade" a Shared Album to a Shared Library...
 
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