Do shared albums take up space on my devices?

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.

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.

Shared album files are kept in the com.apple.photo.icloud.sharedstreams folder which is buried in the Library folder in your Mac's user home folder.

It would be great if there was a way to make the Mac not download local copies of these photos. But it would probably be considered a roundabout way to get free photo storage.

After hours of research, this is what I found:

No, they won't take up space from your device (other than the space the thumbnails and temporarily cached photos take) but it's not a perfect and free way to backup your photos and videos because they are downsampled to approximately 3.1-3.5MP for photos, and 720p for videos.

On a Mac all photos you are sharing to shared albums are cached locally in your user library - in the reduced size they are shared to iCloud. Photos will be reduced to 2048 pixels at the longest edge (Panoramic photos can be up to 5400 pixels wide.). I would not delete the originals from my Photos Library.

On macOS 10.13 High Sierra you can see the complete copies of the photos and videos in your shared albums in the sandbox of the cloudphotosd process:

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

I just shared an album with four photos and eight videos, and this album is taking up exactly the same amount of storage locally on all my Macs in the user library as in iCloud - 0.5GB of storage. Even sharing such a small album will increase the storage noticeably.

I assume these shared albums count towards my iCloud storage space allocation?

No. iCloud Photo Sharing FAQ - Apple Support

Yes. If you add a photo to a shared album and then delete the photo from your Camera Roll it will remain in the shared album.

One simple question. Where are shared folders stored? No need for 40 links to different FAQs. One simple question, so frustrating

<Edited by Host>

Thanks for this. But cheese-aholic's question is about his iOS devices (iPhone, iPad etc.) And that's the same question I'm asking!

Removed

If you have the iCloud Photo Library enabled, deleting a photo on it will delete it from all devices with iCloud Photo Library enabled.