Q: Do shared albums take up space on my devices?

I've never been able to figure out how shared photos are stored, one of my complaints with Photos.  It is very confusing for large libraries on the storage, I have about 15 GB of photos on my device, many of which are in "shared library"  I will try deleting the original out of the "all photos" and see what happens.  I have the original stored in a conventional folder format, so I know I won't lose them.

One simple question. Where are shared folders stored? No need for 40 links to different FAQs. One simple question, so frustrating 

<Edited by Host>

The answer to your simple question was easy while running the earlier MacOS X versions, with iPhoto and Aperture on MacOS X 10.10. or earlier - the shared albums were stored in your user library in a subfolder of ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/,

but since I upgraded to El Capitan and iCloud Photo Library with Photos for Mac, I cannot find them anywhere outside the Photos Library when browsing through the library folder. They seem to have been moved.

With FindAnyFile I managed to track down some of my Shared albums  in this folder -  a cached folder in the sandbox; it cannot be the long term storage for the shared albums, but all photos from the shared albums are duplicated there:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.cloudphotosd/Data/Library/Application Support/com.apple.cloudphotosd/services/com.apple.photo.icloud.sharedstreams/as sets/

Thanks for this. But cheese-aholic's question is about his iOS devices (iPhone, iPad etc.) And that's the same question I'm asking!

Sorry but this is the Photos for Mac forum so all posts here should be related to Photos for Mac - posts about IOS devices or any subject other than Photos for Mac should not be here but in the correct forum for the question - if you call your Ford dealer with questions you are not going to be answers about your Chevy

Here you will get answers about Photos for Mac

LN

Did you EVER get your question answered?  I have the same question and cannot find a clear response.  All of the apple articles seem to gloss over the issue of how to delete pictures from an iPhone without also deleting them from the iCloud.

I just did a small test with 2 photos that I added to a shared album and then deleted on my phone.  They are not listed under "photos" on my phone nor on my mac but are still in the albums.

Removed

If you have the iCloud Photo Library enabled, deleting a photo on it will delete it from all devices with iCloud Photo Library enabled.