Shared Library Albums and Folders

But still, it is rather confusing. We are sharing neatly arranged albums, smart albums, and folders, but the other members of the family group have to recreate thousands of albums and folders, which is very wasteful.

The photos I am sharing are removed from my personal iCloud Photos Library, and I am still seeing them in their respective albums, but all other are only seeing a mess of thousands of photos. Even sharing just a moderately sized library with 50000 items or so, will create a daunting mess on the devices of the other family members. We would have to share each album separately with a comment about the event the photos are from. As it is now, we are still not sharing a library, just a collection of photos without any structure. And to save my edits and metadata, I have to duplicate all photos, before I am sharing them, or I might lose my work.

I've been using the new Shared Library feature here, and found it works well for my needs.

As I see it, it retains any albums and folders on your own system, so any that you have created do remain exactly as they were before transferring to the Shared Library.

Likewise, with the other person sharing, any they add also remain in any folders or albums they set up.

I think this is understandable. Each user will have their own ways of organising their libraries, so all they are presented with is a basic set of images in a standard library of 'All Photos'. It is then up to each individual to organise their view of the library as they see fit.

For me, who has built up my collection of images over 20+ years, and has them organised into Folders and Albums, it has remained to be stored like that after switching many of my images to the Shared Library. I have mine in various configurations, starting with a legacy layout of Folders for years, and Albums for each event in that year (with a date at the start of the title). That is probably unnecessary, but it does help with any photos that may have got incorrect date stamps on them. They still work as expected after moving some into the Shared Library.

For my wife, who has only a handful of albums and folders, it doesn't matter there, she uses the Photos searching tools to find what she wants, and creates only albums that she needs for quick access to small collections.

Personally I think this works fine, leaving each individual to sort out their own library organising. Of course the initial set up will be a bit of hard work, depending on your own needs. You may have to transfer each albums one at a time, and recreate on the shared system as you go. It'll take time, but once done, then you can leave the sharer to sort things out themselves.

All I see different in my Library is the shared icon in the corner of each image.

Of course it might get a little messy once new images start appearing in the Shared Library, that much I have yet to work out. That's where we really need Smart Albums working in Photos on the iDevices. I have been looking to see if I can create an Automation to handle that, but haven't worked that out yet.

Cheers.

Same problem here. Folders and albums are an essential part of a photo library. People spend a lot of time organizing their photos. Sharing the library without its organization is almost useless. This is a rather shocking limitation. Hope Apple can release the "complete" feature soon.

Same discussion here:

How do Shared Albums and Shared Libraries… - Apple Community

Send your feedback to Apple, it might help to speed up the process:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

léonie wrote:

What I would prefer would be to have a separate shared library in addition to my private iCloud Photos Library.

My iCloud Photos Library is my most important library and sharing photos from this library is removing them from my iCloud Photos Library. The photo and videos I would want to share are my very best photos and so they need to stay in my iCloud Photos Library, so I can see and access them on all my devices. But sharing is removing them from my iCloud Photos Library and moving then to the Shared library. I can no longer see my best and most important photos and videos on the devices that cannot be upgraded to Ventura, iOS 16, or iPadOS 16.

Yes, having un-upgradeable devices does present an issue of course. In which case, the Shared Library feature is something that you have to forego at this time I suppose.

But really, do you even want to be sharing your best and most important images across a potentially destructive and hazardous system? Surely these are best shared using the older Shared Albums system, where they are completely separated from the main library.

It would be much better to have a separate, well organised shared library, where we can share albums and not just photos, that would leave our personal library unmodified, in addition to our private iCloud Photos Library.

That just goes back to the old issue that we can only have one System Library. You could always have more than one Library, but only one could be in iCloud, and shared in any way.

I suspect there is more than one mechanism at work here, and what we have right now is a compromise.

I think I understand what you mean though. I know they have made it possible to have a Personal and a Shared library separately, but as you say, you have to completely move the originals into one or the other (which I suppose is correct really, why would you want to have duplicates in normal use?).

And, if you think more about this, having a shared photo asset management system has always been a very tricky proposition, there are so many possible ways for things to fail. As far as I know, nobody else comes even near to doing something like this (at least not at a consumer cost level anyway), and probably for very good reason.

I think it's unlikely that we're going to see anything more complex from Apple, they will almost certainly be looking at how this works for an average 'consumer', and probably not for anyone with more advanced needs.

Cheers

It’s completely insane that Apple released Shared Libraries without album functionality included. Any member should be able to copy their existing albums into the Shared Library. Any member should be able to create and maintain albums inside of the Shared Library. Changes to albums within a library should be synchronized with all users of the library.

it’s literally that simple Apple! It’s just folders with symbolic links to the original files in the Shared Library. They should be embarrassed that the richest company in the world can’t figure out how organize a shared folder. LOL.

OK, so Apple for simplicity chose that all organization of the shared library is entirely personal.

Then at least let family members see how another member organized the shared photos and let them copy this.

For my particular case, my wife and I put in time to organize our biggest life moments in albums spanning about 15 years of our life together on a shared Mac. Since, we have moved on to personal laptops/devices over the previous 5 years or so. I have recently put in time to get all of our older files backed up, photos and others, into iCloud so they are easily accessed by both of us on our individual devices. This has been fairly straight forward and easy to accomplish for the "other" files (organized in folders), yet for the photos, it just seems strange that retaining the albums previously created cannot be shared. I can see the albums, yet she cannot; for her the photos are there, which is amazing, yet it is just a mess. My sole purpose with the photos is to be able to access all of these great memories, in an organized way, on our iPhones where we actually will see them, trickled in, on a daily basis rather than tucked away backed up on the cloud or on a hard drive somewhere like they have been. I would have to guess that I am pretty typical use case, I could definitely be wrong. My hope is that Apple has plans to make the ability to share the album structure possible for those that want to. Can anyone confirm or deny that this may be a future capability?

Things are even worse:

• On my phone Photos app, i switch to Shared Library (top right button) and i still see the Albums that i have on Personal Library, but with "zero" photos. Makes no sense. If the button switches the view, you should see only the content (Albums and Folders) of the selected view.
• Still on my phone, with Shared Library selected, i create a new Album and add a photo. At the end, i see an empty Album, because the photo i selected is from my Personal Library. Why the **** the content of my Personal Library showed up on the Add photo operation?!
• Went to icloud.com -> Photos, switched to Shared Library and tried to upload a photo from my computer. Result: error popup saying "Cannot upload directly on Shared Library. Have to upload it first on your Personal Library"

Honestly Apple, im shocked how you have released a feature with such kind of limitations!

I organized our whole collection into albums over many years, those still exist on my account however my wife using the shared library cannot see any new albums I create for us, that is the issue.

Same question, more specifically I organize my library with albums. With the new shared library I tested putting shared photos in one new album and non shared photos in a different new album. The album with shared photos does not show up on my wife’s phone, but the shared photos do. Is there a way to also make sure the albums share?

According to macrumors guide:

"All tags, metadata, and location information remain accessible on photos added to an ‌iCloud‌ Shared Photo Library, but albums do not transfer over."

And elitedaily:

"Unfortunately, you won’t be able to create folders within the iCloud Library"

Are you kidding me Apple? I've got 100s of Folders and prob 1000s of Albums from decades of various trips,events, parties, etc. I was looking forward to finally being able to share pics easily with my wife, but if I do so it seems the countless hours of effort I expended organizing my photos would be lost????

That makes this "feature" worse than useless. It would be actively destructive.

Please remedy.

I guess this will work differently for different people.

For sure, I agree, it would be better to have a full syncing system with folders and albums. This is of course a first release of this feature, and it's often said not to jump onto the first release of anything.

I was just pointing out that moving images across to the Shared Library doesn't lose anything in the source Library, all your Folders and Albums remain as they were. Of course I see your point about edits, and perhaps that needs some kind of user lock on them (as there is now for the Recently Deleted folder).

And again, in my case, this hasn't proven to be a great issue. My folder and Album structure has remained, and my Wife has never used that as a system. Most of my photos are marked with keywords and captions, so a quick search on most of our personal subjects does find what is needed.

I had considered the problem of losing work, but I'm hand picking the images that I'm sharing, so not everything is being put into the Shared Library. I also have a separate backup of all my images, so I can always replace any that get deleted accidentally (inconvenient for sure, but not a disaster). Any edits I have are also not critically important, my entire library is only for my personal use as a hobby, or for the family. Having to re-edit is again, only inconvenient, it's not critical.

For those that have such needs, I would argue that Photos is probably not the right app for them anyway. I am of course only discussing my own personal experience and needs from Photos, and certainly appreciate everyone will have their own take on this.

I'm just trying to be realistic about it, and having expectations to match, based on past experience with Photos (which have not always been the best).

For now, I find this is a game changer for me, and the way I want to share my photos with my family. It needs some more working out of course.

Cheers.

What I would prefer would be to have a separate shared library in addition to my private iCloud Photos Library.

My iCloud Photos Library is my most important library and sharing photos from this library is removing them from my iCloud Photos Library. The photo and videos I would want to share are my very best photos and so they need to stay in my iCloud Photos Library, so I can see and access them on all my devices. But sharing is removing them from my iCloud Photos Library and moving then to the Shared library. I can no longer see my best and most important photos and videos on the devices that cannot be upgraded to Ventura, iOS 16, or iPadOS 16.

It would be much better to have a separate, well organised shared library, where we can share albums and not just photos, that would leave our personal library unmodified, in addition to our private iCloud Photos Library.

This cannot be true? So really no organizing can be done in a shared library? What a mess.... useless feature.

I thought finally a solution to get all our family photos organized into the apple ecosystem and say goodbye to my slow NAS. But unfortunately without being able to use photo albums it becomes a disorganized mess of thousands of photos....

Yeah, I didn’t hear anything about it yet so far. It’s also surprising me that not more people are complaining about this. Everybody who is sharing a photo library would face the same blocking issue. I could imagine another solution and that is that there is an option to create and save shared “smart folders” in the shared library. So you could create and save a Smart Folder containing tag tags like: <year or daterange photo creation>+<location>+<persons>+< custom tag>. In this way it doesn’t matter if you have one library containing thousands of photos. You can easily organize them by creating these Smart Folder searches. That would be really the ultimate solution.