Sharing photos from two accounts.

Hi Leonie,

the thing is, that my wife and me have seperate Apple IDs but our Apple-IDs are connected as one family. We both have a iCloud-Library in Photos with Gigabytes of redundant pictures. Now we want to use the same iCloud-Library in Photos but also keep seperate Apple-IDs for the rest (iMessage, Calendar, Mail, etc.). With a classic / offline Library it is possible (Sharing photo libraries among multiple users - Apple Support). As far as i know there is no way to merge 2 iCloud-Libraries together and grant full permissions to another person...

Regards Sebastian

sebastian77 wrote:

Hi,

as far as I know it is not possible to use 2 different Apple IDs on one ios device....

iOS devices are single user devices, but a Mac is not. You can have several user accounts with different iCloud Apple IDs on the same Mac.

You can share your iCloud storage plan using family sharing, but not the iCloud Photo Library.Apple allows to share selected photos in shared albums, but not photo libraries in iCloud. Even if you share the library on your Mac on an external drive, you would have to upload the library to iCloud twice - separately for each of your AppleIDs.

léonie wrote:

Even if you share the library on your Mac on an external drive, you would have to upload the library to iCloud twice - separately for each of your AppleIDs.

Hi Leonie,

this sounds interesting. Lets make an example:

- Bob and Alice have two different user accounts on the same Mac.

- Both have a iPhone with their own Apple ID enabled

- Both have a own Apple / iCloud ID.

- Both Apple IDs are connected to one family

- Both have additional iCloud Space or Alice uses the 200 GB for which Bob is paying for via the iCloud Family

- The photos Library is configured on a a seperate hdd / ssd / partition / folder which is accessable for both.

What happens, if both enable iCloud Photos Library?

- A redundant upload to both iCloud accounts will not be a problem for me.

- Most important thing is,

- that the two iPhones,

- the two iClouds

- and the Mac are in sync...

- and that the Photos library is only 1x on the Mac

Did anybody try this?

Regards Sebastian

I never tried it, but it should work.

I prefer to share selected photos with other family members, not a shared library. I do not want other family members to delete photos I add, and I do not want to have to wade to twenty versions of the same photo added by other family members. We keep separate libraries and send each other the photos we like best.

Apple needs to support default uploading of new pictures to the/a shared folder. This is not a difficult solution. The ability to have shared family folders on icloud drive is also a need. those two changes would allow removing all of the other software as a service options.

A general rule most companies should get back on board with is "Support the Family".

See this -- iCloud Photo Sharing - Apple Support

I'm having the same issue and would like my wife to have access to our entire photo library. She's the person who likes to get together with her friends to do scrapbooking and it doesn't work well when she can't access all of our photos. I know there are ways around this limitation, in my case using Dropbox, but it's not elegant and I'd like to use Apple Photos. Also, keeper of the Photo Library has been relegated to me as my wife is not the technical one.

The family share album works like any other album and reduces the size of the photos shared in it. This is not what I want when I'm saving these photos to our main library to archive. I want to archive the originals. I have the family either Airdrop photos/videos to me or transfer the photos/videos off their devices manually or use another service such as Dropbox. Speaking of Dropbox, filenames, I would like to see Apple get rid of using the IMG_XXXX.ext and store the photos and videos using the date/time the photo or video was taken. Much more useful than IMG with an incremented number attached especially when it comes to video files.

Here are my 2 cents on how I would want to see it iCloud photo library sharing within a family work:

As the family share manager, I would maintain a central library and if needed, purchase the space necessary on iCloud to house the library. Everybody in the family will still have their own iCloud accounts and libraries as it is now. I would then give permissions to each member in the family to do any combination of the following: ADD, VIEW, DELETE, MODIFY, and etc. Each member of the family would then be able contribute, manually or maybe even automatically, to the central photos library depending on their permissions. I'm sure there are other features I'm missing, but basically this would make iCloud photo library work for me and my family. Yes, I know, it's not always supposed to be about me but... Oh, and did I mention file naming...

Thanks for letting me rant 😁 It's the one area with our memories where I get kind of passionate.

If you upload your central photos Library to iCloud Photo Library, and share the iCloud password for that account with all family members, all members can upload and download photos at www.icloud.com using the Photos.app at that web page.

This is true, but we all want our own iCloud accounts. Thanks for the reply!

I meant - create a separate AppleID for sharing the central photos library and keep your separate AppleID accounts as well for email, contacts, calendars, music, and your own photo libraries.

Ah! Thanks for the clarification. I will look into that as an option.

Hi,

as far as I know it is not possible to use 2 different Apple IDs on one ios device....

That looks like it should work.