Shared Album unable to download only photos from other members

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Level 1

11 points

Shared Album unable to download only photos from other members

I am trying to figure out if there is a way with an iOS/iCloud Shared album if there is a way to only download and add the photos from the other shared album members and not re-download all the photos I shared to the album. For example there are 3 of us in the iOS Shared album. I tend to take and import more photos to the album than the other 2 members ( I become the unofficial photog lol). At the end of the vacation I want to be able to only import the photos from the other two members into my personal library and not redownload the 1000+ I took. I know I can download all and then run the iOS Photo Duplicate checker, but this seems more of a hassle than just importing cleanly from the start.

We tried the Shared Photo Library as a test run (instead of the Shared Album). I am not a fan of the Shared Library, not to mention you can only create one and we don't always travel with the same group. I also tried to see if the Photos app on the MacOS was any different, and there was nothing option wise that was any different.

We have used The Guest app in the past for photo sharing and they did an excellent job at aggregating photos and then making it easy to only download/import the photos from other group members and not redownload your own photos you shared. They retained full quality and the location data so it was a perfect app, but they are now shut down. I have been unable to find a comparable app that is either free or if they charge they don't make it easy to download photos. (Not to mention apple like Cluster and Ceremony are no longer being supported but still usable).

If anyone has any ideas on how to filter which photos you download from the Share Album I would love to hear how. Thanks in advance if anyone has any insight on how to do this easily and cleanly.

iPhone 14 Pro Max, iOS 16

Posted on Jun 2, 2023 3:42 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Thae20 Author

Level 1

11 points

Jun 3, 2023 7:53 AM in response to léonie

Thanks for the reply, but that is not really the issue. Also, you can retain the Metadata by going under Options when you select the photos you want to save. There are switches for Location and All Photos Data. I dont have any issues with the saving photos.

I just want a way for the Photos app to be able to intelligently filter the photos so that I am only downloading the photos from other group members and not the photos I posted and end up with a large amount of duplicates.

It does not seem this is possible in photos and I'm just going to have to live with downloading ALL the photos from the Shared Album and then letting photos run a duplicate check. This is not ideal abs honestly for me frustrating. I submitted an enhancement request to Apple so maybe one day this feature will appear.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

197,279 points

Jun 3, 2023 1:51 AM in response to Thae20

Thee problem is that the many metadata will get stripped, when you add a photo to a shared album. There is nothing to go on. Perhaps you can filter by the camera model in a smart album or a text phrase in the caption.

The captions will be displayed as a comment and are saved in the smart album, but only, if you are sharing each photo individually, not a batch of photos at once.

You can also find the photos shared by others in the Activity for the shared albums, where you can save the shred photos individually.

It would be much easier to create a separate shared album for each of the invited participant, where they can upload the photos for you. Then you will know who shared which photo. And a joined shared album with all the photos where you merge the shared photos into one album.

You can have up to 200 shared albums. The individual albums will have the advantage that there are less photos and easier to browse.

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Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

197,279 points

Jun 3, 2023 9:51 AM in response to Thae20

Sorry, that I did not explain better what I meant. You cannot separate the photos in a shared album based on the metadata in a photo, because these are removed automatically, when we share them to a shared album. There is nothing to go on, when we want to try to identify who shared a photo. Only text we add to the captions can be written to the Shared album and we could use it when search for photos shared by others.

That is why it is best to avoid this complication by having everybody share the photos to a separate shared album, so our own photos will not be mixed with the photos shared by the others.

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Answer 4

denis124

Level 1

8 points

Feb 4, 2024 7:02 AM in response to Thae20

Did you ever figure out how to do this? I have the exact same question.

three of us uploaded photos to a shared album. I now want to save the photos from the other two people onto my own camera roll.

but there is no way to filter by the person who uploaded them.

I thought about downloaded all hoping it would be smart enough not to duplicate my photos but it’s not. Seems like a straight forward request???

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Shared Album unable to download only photos from other members

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