How do you move an Album from a shared library to your personal library?

With the new Photos shared library feature, you can move individual photos/videos back and forth between your personal library and your shared library. Is there a way to move an entire album without having to select all of the contents?

Mac mini, macOS 15.0

Posted on Oct 19, 2024 9:21 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 21, 2024 9:39 PM

No. Albums always stay in your personal library; only the photos and videos "move" between personal and shared libraries. Luckily, selecting all of the contents of an album is as easy as entering the album and issuing select-all (command-A).

7 replies

Dec 1, 2024 11:02 PM in response to David Hill5

Let's say I have family photos from the past 30 years and I want to share those photos with my mother. The way you've described this implies that I have to have my mother organize tens of thousands of photos she didn't take into galleries and folders, even though I have already done all of that work. That requires the shared party to be both computer savvy and a heavy Photos user. What would be more useful for my use case is the ability to share galleries and folders and have those show up with the same organization and structure in her Photos app. I want her to be a consumer of the existing structure rather than a creator of a new structure based on my going through each album and adding metadata to the pictures to name the album and have her pull that specific metadata and create new albums on her own. That will likely never happen, but she would happily view something that I've already done.


Way back in the iPhotos days, I could share albums via a website (sort of like Flickr) where they can see multiple albums and navigate from there. That functionality was replaced with the current sharing options, but that doesn't present a site with multiple galleries that someone could navigate. I eventually started uploading pics to Flickr, but even that is a lot of manual work because there wasn't functionality to easily convert albums in Photos to albums in Flickr (you have to manually export the photos in an album, upload that folder to Flickr, and then organize those photos in Flickr into albums which is essentially duplicate work like the current shared photos feature).


So in conclusion, it would be lovely if there were an enhancement to the shared library to allow the sharing of entire folders and albums (not just photos within an album) with their existing structure for other Photos users, and an Apple version of a Flickr-type website where you could share a set of public galleries that are navigable from a public shared album home page for non-Photos users and Windows folk.


Thanks for your time if you made it through this response! lol

Dec 1, 2024 9:16 PM in response to David Hill5

The photos remain organized for you when you view them with your personal library open. Apparently other subscribers are responsible for imposing whatever Folder/Album structure they want to see.


The attributes that are stored with the individual photos are visible to any subscriber. Last I tested, those included keywords, locations, descriptions, captions, and titles. Some of them can be used by other subscribers to construct Smart Albums.

Dec 1, 2024 10:19 PM in response to markwmsn

Let's say I have family photos from the past 30 years and I want to share those photos with my mother. The way you've described this functionality implies that I have to have my elderly mother organize tens of thousands of photos she didn't take into meaningful galleries and folders, even though I have already done all of that work. That makes the feature not useful for someone who isn't both computer savvy and a heavy Photos user. What would be more useful for my use case is the ability to share galleries and folders and have those show up with the same organization and structure.


This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

How do you move an Album from a shared library to your personal library?

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.