Using the Shared iCloud Photos Library to have two separate Photos Libraries on all your devices

With macOS 13 Ventura and iOS 16/iPadOS 16 Apple introduced the Shared iCloud Photos Library for sharing a joint library in iCloud with our family members. How to use iCloud Shared Photo Library – Apple Support (UK)

But we can use Shared iCloud Photos Library even better, if we are not sharing the library with others, just with ourselves. It can help us to solve two annoying limitations on our devices in particular on our mobile devices:

• To have separate libraries for our private photos and our work photos: On a Mac we can already have as many Photos Libraries as we want. This way we can split our Photos Libraries into separate sets according to the purpose we are needing them for, for example separate private photos from business photos. Unfortunately, we do not have this option on the mobile devices; we can only have one photo library there and have to manage the professional and private pictures in a single library, if we do not have a separate professional iPhone or iPad with separate Apple IDs. And we can only have one iCloud Photos Library on any device.
• Hide photos temporarily, but keep them visible in the albums: In the early versions of Photos, we were able to hide photos to temporarily from the photos library to keep them out of sight, without having to delete them outright. This made the photos library easier to browse if we wanted to focus on photos that should still be organized in albums or tagged with metadata. The photos remained visible in the albums and were only hidden in the photos library. But Apple has changed the "hiding" into a privacy feature to keep confidential photos private - as quite a few users requested. Now the hidden photos are hidden everywhere and no longer visible in albums since iOS 11 and macOS 10.14 Mojave. Since then, hiding is no longer suitable as a tool for managing the media library. It is no longer possible to remove items from All Photos or Recents rowed these albums out without deleting the photos.

With both problems, the Shared iCloud Photo Library can help if we don't need it to share photos with the family and are already using iCloud Photos to sync our pictures and videos and are willing to pay for additional iCloud Storage.

If we enable the Shared iCloud Photo Library for our iCloud Photo Library, we will have two libraries (a personal and a shared library), that can be managed at the same time in the same window. We can move selected photos from our personal library to the Shared iCloud Photo Library or back. It is not necessary to invite anyone to share our Shared iClod Photos Library. But I invited myself with my second AppleID, which I use for media and purchases. After moving items to the Shared iCloud Photoslibrary, the shared photos and videos are still visible in the albums we have created. All adjustments and metadata will also be there. And in the toolbar we will have the extremely useful switch to switch between the two media libraries or browse both libraries together:

The personal media library: Here we see the photos and videos that we did not (yet) share.

The shared media library: Here we see the photos that we have moved to the Shared iCloud Photoslibrary.

• Both media libraries: Here we are seeing the photos from our two media libraries united.

This is how I use the two media libraries:

• The Shared iCloud Photoslibrary: I am currently setting up the shared library as a show case for selected photos - it is containing only photos or videos that I have developed and adjusted as good as I can. These are the photos I am using for projects like books or slideshows and like to show to other. On the iPhone and iPad I am keeping the toggle switch set to the Shared Library, and thus I am seeing automatically a curated collection of my best photos I am satisfied with. This helps if you want to show photos. The shared media library is the showcase for guests.

• My personal library is my workshop or construction site. Here I collect the new photos and videos, and here the photos are remaining while they still need to be edited or tagged with metadata or added to albums, or have to be deleted at some point, or where I cannot yet decide which version I want to delete.

• To work with all my photos or to compare my personal with the shared photoslibrary, I set the switch to "Both libraries". Also, in order to display the duplicate album or "People and Pets", "Both Libraries" needs to be selected.

Alternatively, the separation between personal media library and shared media library can also be used to separate business photos from private photos or to separate images that have been shared with us from our own photos, or whatever separation we need.

Restrictions: We can only use this method if all of our devices support Shared iCloud Photo Library. On my three oldest Macs where still macOS 10.14 Mojave is installed, only the pictures in the personal iCloud photo library can be seen.

And if we want to use the iCloud Shared Photo Library to share photos, we should only use it for sharing. People we invite to our Shared iCloud Photo Library can edit all the photos we share and change the metadata, and the photos they contribute will fill our "showcase" with additional images and videos, which would defeat the purpose.

Unfortunately, people we invite to our shared library only see the pictures, videos, but not the albums and folders. Only we can see the structure in our own library. The Shared iCloud Photos Library might not yet be the cream of the crop for sharing, but it is a very versatile tool for splitting our library into two separate working sets - we will be getting most out of the Shared iCloud Photo Library when we use it only for ourselves to have two linked libraries in iCloud, not for sharing.

The version for iOS/iPadOS (currently only in German): Teile die Geteilte iCloud Fotosmediathek nur mit dir selbst, um Fotos aus der Mediathek zu verschieben