Turn My Album into Shared Album
Is there a way to turn a "My Album" into a "Shared Album"?
Question marked as
Shared albums are stored in iCloud and are shown in your Photos Library on the iPhone, but are not a part of the library.
The standard albums are just collections of photos stored already in your library. They are referencing your photos in the library, so they do not need extra storage. You can add a photo to many albums without creating duplicates. When you delete the photo, it will be removed from all albums it has been added to.
Shared albums are very different. When you share a photo in a shared album, Photos will create a copy of the photo, optimized for sharing. The copy will be reduced in sized to at most 2028 pixel at the longest edge and metadata will be stripped, so you do not give away any confidential information with the photo. The copying the shared album will persist, even if you delete it from the original album.
You are probably expecting the Shared albums to be like albums, because they are now called "Album". But are not really albums. Shared Albums are the old Shared Photo Streams, introduced with iPhoto and Aperture and have not changed much. Only the name has been changed from "Shared Photo Stream" to "Shared album", and they are still streams of photos, not albums. When we add a photo to a shared album or comment on a photo, the subscribers will receive an alert and the photo will be added at the end of the stream, so the subscribers can find it in one place. Shared albums are meant to be used as a dialogue about shared photos. We share a photo, the subscribers comment on it, reply by sharing a matching photo in return. We comment on the new photos, then respond again by sharing another photo. They are essentially an early form of a chat with photos like Messages. But ever since Apple has changed the name to "Shared Albums" people want to use them like albums to share a gallery of photos and are disappointed there is no automatic way to share the titles, keywords, or the photos exactly in the order they are in the album.
To share the photos in an album exactly as you have arranged them, you have to share each photo individually and drop them into the shared album exactly in the order you want them, one at a time. Any information you want to share with the photo has to be added as a comment on the shared photo. If the photo has a caption, it will be automatically added as a comment, when you share the photos individually.
When I want to share an existing album, I prefer to share it as an iCloud link. This way the photos will be shared in the full quality with all metadata. See: Share photos and videos with an iCloud Link on iCloud.com – Apple Support (UK)
