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Do shared albums take up space on my devices?

If I create a shared album in Photos, and add photos to it, does it take up space on my device(s) or are all the photos stored in the cloud?

Can I then delete the original photo from my device(s) and still have the photos available in my shared album?

iPad (4th gen) Wi-Fi + Cellular (MM), iOS 8

Posted on Aug 18, 2015 4:20 AM

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Posted on Sep 24, 2017 12:42 PM

Hi Everyone!


Cheese, did you manage to solve your issue in the end?

I was also looking for a way to have access to all my photos but not have them stored on the phone itself. As far as i’ve learned, once you delete a photo on iphone it gets deleted on icloud and all your other devices and vice versa.


I then like you thought i’d create a shared folder -thinking this is stored *exclusively* on the icloud - and dump bunch of old photos there which i would then be able to access from my phone without using up space on the phone itself. I had 4.19gb of photos on iphone, created shared folder, moved half of the photos there and deleted the “originals”, h

owever what happened is now instead of reducing the load on my phone it increased to over 5gb for some reason (?!) and i’ve no idea why. Also, what’s odd is that on my Mac a lot of the photos in my new shared folder haven’t even synced.


I would appreciate if anyone has managed to sort out how to just have all your photos uploaded on iCloud and then just be able to access them without having to have the on your iphone *as well*. Thanks

44 replies

Nov 27, 2015 11:13 AM in response to snewsie

snewsie wrote:


Cheese a holic......a search brought me to this post of yours. I am new to the mac and need to know how to import my photos to the NAS. How did you do it? I honestly don't want to mess with the iCloud or PHOTOS on my MAC, I just want to go straight from the device to the NAS. HELP 🙂

That is not possible - the Photos library can only be on a locally connected drive that is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) - it can not be on a NAS


You can backup the photos (not the library) by exporting to the NAS


LN

Nov 27, 2015 11:32 AM in response to LarryHN

No idea if this is possible or not...

Personally I use Photos app on my Mac and just copy my photos onto my NAS every couple of weeks or so as a backup.

Not ideal, but iCloud seems fairly stable at keeping my photos so I'm not too worried.

I've enabled iCloud Photo Library on all my devices, so they're sort of backed up if I lose / break a device.


Still no-one has actually answered my original post - do shared albums actually take up space on my device...???

Nov 27, 2015 11:42 AM in response to cheese_aholic

Hello Cheese, I was told in a recent call to Apple that shared album photos do not take up space on the devices of the people you share with, so I am assuming the shared album doesn't take up extra space on my devices as well and everything is linked to the cloud copy. I think that this makes sense because if you notice when you open Sharing there is an Activity view which shows all the pictures again and in a sequence of time added. This would make 3 copies if they weren't just linking the originals. Not sure I can prove my theory though.

Nov 27, 2015 2:19 PM in response to cheese_aholic

Thanks Cheese,

I actually just tried that...I guess I will download into photos and then just export to NAS in batches. Thank you! And I also have the same issue with the shared photos. My husband dumps so many into that shared album I feel like it's clogging my device but evidently not. My iPhone says storage is almost full but I literally only have 30 photos on it but the photo storage shows 4g used by photos?

Dec 3, 2015 10:36 AM in response to snewsie

Use the Image Capture application on your Mac.



  • Connect your iPhone to your computer, then turn the device on. If the device is locked with a passcode, enter it.
  • Launch Image Capture. In Image Capture, select the device in the Devices or Shared list.
  • Use the buttons at the bottom of the Image Capture window to view the thumbnails as a list (User uploaded file) or to see larger thumbnails (User uploaded file), or to rotate (User uploaded file) or delete (User uploaded file) images. Drag the slider in the lower-right corner of the window to change the thumbnail size.
  • Click the Import To pop-up menu, then choose where to save the images on your NAS.

Do shared albums take up space on my devices?

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