Do shared albums take up space on my devices?

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/

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

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.

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.