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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

Dec 4, 2015 10:49 AM in response to cheese_aholic

I've never been able to figure out how shared photos are stored, one of my complaints with Photos. It is very confusing for large libraries on the storage, I have about 15 GB of photos on my device, many of which are in "shared library" I will try deleting the original out of the "all photos" and see what happens. I have the original stored in a conventional folder format, so I know I won't lose them.

Apr 11, 2016 7:01 AM in response to hugh2oneill

The answer to your simple question was easy while running the earlier MacOS X versions, with iPhoto and Aperture on MacOS X 10.10. or earlier - the shared albums were stored in your user library in a subfolder of ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/,

but since I upgraded to El Capitan and iCloud Photo Library with Photos for Mac, I cannot find them anywhere outside the Photos Library when browsing through the library folder. They seem to have been moved.


With FindAnyFile I managed to track down some of my Shared albums in this folder - a cached folder in the sandbox; it cannot be the long term storage for the shared albums, but all photos from the shared albums are duplicated there:


~/Library/Containers/com.apple.cloudphotosd/Data/Library/Application Support/com.apple.cloudphotosd/services/com.apple.photo.icloud.sharedstreams/as sets/

Apr 11, 2016 7:27 AM in response to hugh2oneill

Sorry but this is the Photos for Mac forum so all posts here should be related to Photos for Mac - posts about IOS devices or any subject other than Photos for Mac should not be here but in the correct forum for the question - if you call your Ford dealer with questions you are not going to be answers about your Chevy


Here you will get answers about Photos for Mac


LN

May 28, 2016 12:43 PM in response to cheese_aholic

Did you EVER get your question answered? I have the same question and cannot find a clear response. All of the apple articles seem to gloss over the issue of how to delete pictures from an iPhone without also deleting them from the iCloud.


I just did a small test with 2 photos that I added to a shared album and then deleted on my phone. They are not listed under "photos" on my phone nor on my mac but are still in the albums.

Nov 18, 2016 12:29 PM in response to Brett L

Hi Brett I'm curious about something I pay extra money for the iCloud to have more gigabytes of data why am I giving them money when I only want it to store my photos but I cannot delete them off my phone. Basically it's like throwing away money I actually don't see the purpose now of what the iCloud actually does for me . I do know if I have to hard reset my phone then I could get all my data back but really that's the only purpose it's really serving me right now I thought it was actually to store my photos so I could delete them off my phone.

Nov 18, 2016 12:47 PM in response to snewsie

Be aware that you can't run, store or backup a Photos library to an NAS device. It's file format is not compatible with the complex ecosystem of database files and hard links that make up a Photos library.


There's no problem will backing up/storing the image files to the NAS server as you would any file but just not an iPhoto, Photos or Aperture library package.

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Do shared albums take up space on my devices?

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