Mac Photos Tricks & Tips
A Quick Guide to Shared Albums in Photos on Mac
Things you may not know
Shared Albums in Apple’s Photos app are an easy way to share photos and videos with family and friends. You can create Shared Albums from your Mac, iPhone or iPad. You and the invitee participants can add more photos and videos to these albums anytime — and also comment on them.
Before You Start
To create a Shared Album, you must have iCloud Photos turned on (In Mac Photos > Settings > iCloud > Shared Albums). Note that Shared Albums are different from Apple’s iCloud Shared Photos Library feature.
Creating and Managing
Step-by-step details of how to create, modify or delete Shared Albums; how to manage subscribers, etc. are given in this tutorial by Apple. In this post, we’ll explain other things you should know when using Shared Albums.
Benefits of Shared Albums
Photos stored in Shared Albums do not count towards your iCloud storage. Apple hosts these at no cost to you or other subscribers.
Shared Albums use minimal incremental storage on users’ devices — Only thumbnails are stored; larger images are downloaded only on demand.
Subscribers must connect to the internet when first syncing Shared Albums to their devices. After smaller images have been generated, the albums can be enjoyed without being online — as on a plane.
You can own and subscribe to 200 Shared Albums, and each Shared Album can have up to 5000 photos and videos. Pretty good for a free service!
You can share such albums with iCloud Photos users (who can view them in Photos app on their devices) as well as non-users (view via a website link.)
Shared Albums provide a good way to pool photos, e.g. from everyone on a trip or at a party; or to gather photos from schoolmates for a slideshow for a reunion — or if you’re scanning old family photos and want to enlist family members’ help in identifying faces, places and dates.
Need to free up space in your Mac, iOS devices or iCloud account? Here’s a hack: Move all non-keepsakes like screenshots, memes, videos saved from chats and social media etc. to Shared Albums, and delete them from your Photos library. They’ll remain accessible on all devices via Photos > Shared Albums but won’t consume your storage 😉.
Limitations of Shared Albums
Shared Albums store photos at lower resolution: Photos at 2048 pixels along the longer edge, and videos at 720p. That’s about 3 megapixels for photos — what we used to have 20 years ago! What this means in practical terms:
- You shouldn’t use Shared Albums as backup or to free up iCloud storage by moving photos into Shared Albums and deleting them from Photos.
- Photos from Shared Albums can’t be used to make large prints. A 48MP photo from an iPhone can be used to make a 34"x25" (240 DPI) print; a 12MP photo for a 17"x12.5" print — but a 2048x1536 photo saved from a Shared Album is good enough only for a 8.5" x 6.4" print.
Also, photos in Shared Albums are stripped of metadata such as captions, titles and keywords. Only creation dates and locations are kept. You can’t even add title, caption, keywords or locations, or adjust date & time.
You can’t edit photos in a Shared Album without downloading them into your own album. Photos cannot be rearranged by drag-&-drop, and sorting options are limited. You can, however, ‘Like’ photos and add comments by clicking on the little icon in bottom left of a photo:
Shared Albums’ contents are excluded from the Photos app’s smart features e.g. search, face recognition, smart albums and duplicate identification.
If a Shared Album’s creator deletes the album, all subscribers lose access to it. Other subscribers can also delete the photos that they shared. As such, for assured access to Shared Album assets contributed by others, you must download them to your Photos library or computer.
Another big limitation is that you can only download 1000 photos at a time from a Shared Album. Since an album can have up to 5000 photos, and you might have several such albums, it can take a lot of time and effort.
Saving Shared Albums
This should be straightforward, shouldn’t it? It isn’t, unfortunately 😅. A Shared Album may have photos added by you and others. How do you download only those contributed by others, without duplicating the ones that you contributed, which are already in your Photos library.
As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated!
If you are the owner/creator of an album AND you added all photos before others did, click View > Sort > Newest Date Added. Others’ photos will come after yours. Select them > Right-click > Import to add them to your library.
If you aren’t the owner of the album but contributed all your photos at the same time, you may still be able to use the above hack, as long as you can identify your photos which will all be together after sorting.
You could also select and import the entire album, and click Duplicates in the sidebar to find and delete the copies. It may be a few hours before the duplicates show up. Duplicates search is available in Ventura and later.
Downloading Shared Albums
What if you don’t want to clog your Photos library and fill up iCloud storage with hundreds of photos of a company picnic or thousands of screenshots archived in a Shared Album, but still need to keep them somewhere?
If it’s a moderate-sized album or you only need to save a few photos, export them with the Photos app. Open the shared album, select photos, and click File > Export in the top menu.
This method lets you download up to 1,000 photos at a time, all from the same album. Since a Shared Album can have 5,000 photos and you may have more than one album, you may have to do multiple exports.
To export several or large (or several large) Shared Albums, you could use Photos Takeout app. Click the Albums tag, scroll down, select the albums, and click Export. No 1000 photos limit, and multiple albums at a time:
A Few More Tips & Tricks
Shared Albums is a nifty feature, but sometimes things don’t work as they should. Here are a few workarounds and hacks:
Getting Shared Albums on a new Mac or iOS device: When you log in with your Apple ID and turn on iCloud Photos, all your photos and albums load automatically. But since Shared Albums don’t live in your iCloud account, sometimes they don’t load. If this happens, create a new, empty Shared Album. This will trigger a sync and soon all Shared Albums will appear!
Using Shared Albums to make family scrapbooks: If you document events such as family vacations, Christmas, birthdays etc. in scrapbooks, and can’t be bothered to get and learn a scrapbook app, Shared Albums are a good way to gather input from everyone and create digital scrapbooks.
Shared Albums not appearing in Photos sidebar: Do you have more than one Photos library? Shared Albums use iCloud, and only your System Photo Library syncs with iCloud — so go to Photos Settings, General tab, and check if you’re looking for Shared Albums in the wrong library.
If you only have one Photos library, try going to Photos Settings > iCloud > turn Shared Albums off > Reboot the Mac > In Photos Settings, turn Shared Albums on, and wait. The missing Shared Albums should reappear.
Any other questions on Shared Albums that we didn’t answer and you can’t resolve with a Google Search? Leave a Comment and we’ll try to help.
