Albums vs Shared Albums Limitations

shared albus are not an organization tool like albums are (they are surprisingly a sharing tool) and are not even really albums, it is a fancy name for a shared photo stream - photos in a shred album have very limited metadata and are reduced in quality and are streamed in the order added and can not be sorted - the only reason to use a shared album is to share reduced quality photos with others - you would never use them yourself

and any Photo in a shared album is also in your library so again no reason fr you to be using them unless you are sharing photos with others

LN

I end up having to move items to my desktop to then make another step and upload to my third party site. Are there any better solutions for this?

If you shared the photos in the albums yourself, you can find back to the originals in your Photos Library by ctrl-clicking the photo in the Shared Album. Then use the command "Show in Moments" to find the original in your library. If "Show in Moments" does not show, use "Import to Library" and then "Show in Moment". Now you can add the photo to a standard album. Previously, in Aperture and older iPhoto versions, Shared Photo Streams transferred the metadata as well, but some users did not want to share the precise GPS locations and other metadata. Apple removed this feature in the newer versions, probably for privacy reasons.