We activated family sharing. Is iCloud storage also shared in the family? What about iTunes match - is this storage also shared?

You might also consider Flickr - you can upload every photo and video you have - 1Tb free storage. All the usual support for auto-upload of camera roll. Groups for sharing etc.

Sad that Apple's much vaunted cloud features are killed by the commercial model. I was hoping they'd raise the 5Gb free limit, but no. Family sharing of the icloud capacity would have helped too.

Has anyone made a quip yet about it being I-cloud, not WE-cloud or something similar?

Cause, if not... first.

How it should work is that I should be allowed to buy a chunk of storage for my entire family that should allocate on the fly between them and I should be able to upgrade in 100GB increments as my family needs more.

paulocoxa wrote:

You can go on Icloud settings of familys idevices and change the icloud login to the family organizer who has the biggest Icloud Storage. The Itunes login won't change and you family members will start to use the same icloud space you have.

It will also work to use Itunes match on all your family's idevices.

That never occurred to me, but if I recall correctly you can't add family members to the Family group if they have the same iCloud ID set up on their device. Pretty sure I was getting an error message when I first tried to set up family sharing and ended up creating unique Apple IDs for everyone. I will try it again and report back if its possible to have the same iCloud ID on all devices while also having them in a Family group.

Poor form Apple...tricked into thinking that purchasing storage and adding family members will enable all the family can enjoy the additional storage. This was not clear from Apple and add mistrust. Why on earth can you share everything else but not storage, does not make any logical sense for me apart from money making on Apple's part.

Not quite everything else. App vendors can opt out, in-app purchases we always excluded and apparently it iTunes Match and/or music is excluded. Given that there are workarounds to all of these that any family or close friends can use and that these generally mean not using these Apple Features, you'd think Apple would want to fix them and make their resource-sharing ecosystem truely "family" friendly.

I found for my family that Microsoft's Office 365 was a good deal. We get office across the families devices and each member gets 1TB of storage for onedrive. All for 99 bucks a year. The only complaint I have about the arrangement is that the one drive app doesn't really upload photos in the background cleanly. It needs access to gps to hack its way as a background service. A practice that is common amongst competitive cloud storage providers. However it works.

nice thing about one drive is the photos are files and don't get sucked up into Photo's database. Not as elegant as using apple's native cloud storage, but until family sharing of iCloud storage happens its the most cost effective way.

U

I just setup family sharing for my family. The main purpose was to share icloud storage for backup purposes for all our phones. I was very dismayed to find out that icloud storage sharing is not included in family sharing. There is absolutely no reason for Apple to do this except to make more money by forcing us to pay for multiple 200GB drives. I hope Apple listens to it's customers and fixes this problem.

Despicable. Nothing surprises me from Apple now a days though. Which is rather sad.

Good Point and very frustrating! I wanted to move our music library/photos/media to icloud thinking my wife and I could share it. This doesn't make sense!

Looks like I'll have to move to another cloud service.

What load of BS cancelling my subscription today.

I would gladly pay a single annual subscription for enough iCloud storage for my entire family to share. Keep it simple !

It's not very nice that you can't share iCloud storage with your family. I'm being polite here. It s*cks!!!

Just activated family sharing with my son and realized that the storage cannot be shared. Really!!! That's cheap! Apple trying to milk money like this? Hope they correct this some day.

Did this change with iOS 10?