Adding photos from another iPhone - quality question

Question

Adding photos from another iPhone - quality question

Here's how we manage our family photos:

All photos stored on my iMac. Backed up to iCloud & local external drive. Photos taken on my iPhone are automatically synced.

Photos taken on my wife's iPhone (different Apple ID) are added to the iMac library via a Lightning to USB-C cable connected from her iPhone to my iMac, same as we do when bringing photos in from our DSLR. This system has worked well for a while now. The photos come in at full quality and are then kept in a library on my iMac that has all our family photos, and of course is backed up.

She has "Download and Keep Originals" selected in Settings/Photos. Starting to run out of space though so would like to change that to "Optimise iPhone Storage". Just wondering if that means the photos added from her phone via the cable will only be the "optimised" quality, not full quality? Will the full quality versions be downloaded from her iCloud when we go to add them?

Also, I'm aware of the option of creating an iCloud Shared Photo Library, but I believe it doesn't share Albums or Folders. Still looking into it though, and happy to be informed by someone with similar circumstances that is using this option successfully.

Cheers

iMac (M1, 2021)

Posted on Aug 1, 2024 6:31 PM

Reply

Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,861 points

Aug 2, 2024 10:08 AM in response to Lionel Hampton

When you enable "optimize Storage" on your iPhone, you will get random results, when you try to download the photos to your wife's iPhone. Only the photos that are currently not optimized will be downloaded to her iPhone. And it will interfere with the duplicate detection on import. Photos already downloaded may appear again as new photos. don't try it, you are risking to get lots of duplicates and risking to miss photos when downloading.

The Shared iCloud library would be the easiest option, if your photos are already in iCloud. You will not need any additional cloud storage.

You are right, only the photos and videos will be shared, not the albums.

For the person who is moving the shared photos to the Shared Library the photos will remain in the original albums, but the person, who is receiving the shared photos they will arrive as a flat set of photos and need to be added again to albums. But you could add a keyword with the album name to all photos in an album you want to share in Photos for Mac, and then recreate the album as a smart album (with the rule "Keyword is ...") in the SHarediCloud Library of the recipient. Both of you would need an account on a Mac to be able to add keywords both photos you are sharing with each other.

Reply

Answer 2

Aug 2, 2024 9:21 AM in response to Lionel Hampton

I believe any method you use to transfer photos from the phone to the computer once you have optimization turned on will result in the lower quality photo being transferred if the photo on the phone is lower quality. It may not be. It all depends on the space on the phone.

You could always log into your wife's iCloud account through icloud.com and download the photos directly from there.

Reply