iCloud [Photos] [iCloud] Public photos shared album not showing all photos

[kojotuse]

Hi,

my wife and I recently returned from out vacation and we wanted to combine photos which we took on the trip. I created shared album on my iphone and shared with her. She added her photos. Both of us see 375 photos and 14 videos in this shared album on our iphones. We decided to share this album with others using public link. And here is the problem. iCloud web page shows only photos added by her. We tried turning off and on public link but same happened. We also tried creating new shared album but result is the same - only hers photos are available via public link. In photos app on my macbook I also see all photos and videos. Generating link from mac photos app also is not resolving problem.

Do you have any idea how to fix that?

 

[RhetTbull]

Do you get the same result if you create the public link on your account and if she creates the public link on her account? My hypothesis is that Apple only allows public sharing of photos taken by the person that created the public link as this would prevent unknowingly sharing photos to the public by others contributing to the shared album. If this hypothesis is correct, one way to fix this would be to import all the other person's photos from the shared album to the Photos library then create a new shared library with the imported photos.

 

[kojotuse]

@RhetTbull thank for your answer.

Original steps to reproduce:

1. iphone ios 15.5 (1) creates shared album shares it with iphone ios 15.5 (2)
2. (2) adds photos to same share album
3. (1) creates public link
4. only photos added by (2) are visible under public link

In the meantime ios 15.6 was released. I'll try to do some more testing and post here results.

 

[kojotuse]

In the meantime I updated both iphones to ios 15.6. Can't say if this resolved the problem or the problem didn't exist from the very beginning because...

I reproduced steps from previous post and it seems that public link shows actions executed on album from newest to oldest and that's why her photos are on the top of album and it's mentioned that she added 180 elements and when I scroll down there are my photos. For now I can't say how it was at earlier attempts to create public shared albums whether only her's photos was shown or it was only my bad not to scroll down to see my photos.

To sum up now I see all photos under public link

The only complain that I have for now is:

• I can't sort from oldest to newest elements on web page.
• I can't sort from oldest to newest elements on mac photos app.
• When I download photo from web page image is only 3Mpx not 12Mpx
• On web page I can't download all or selected photos.

 

[RhetTbull]

Great! Glad you got this figured out.

> I can't sort from oldest to newest elements on mac photos app.

Yes, this is a limitation of Mac Photos for shared albums. For regular albums, you can use the View > Sort menu to sort but you cannot do this in shared albums.

> When I download photo from web page image is only 3Mpx not 12Mpx

This is also a limitation of shared albums. Only a low-resolution JPEG is shared, not the original photo.

Apple is introducing a new kind of shared albums in iOS 16 / MacOS Ventura called iCloud Shared Photos Library that addresses some of these problems.

 

[kojotuse]

Thank you for your help. Will definitely try ios 16 family album.