How to Use Shared Albums in Photos on Mac

Shared Albums are the oldest and most generous photo-sharing deal Apple offers: everyone you invite can view, comment on, and (if you allow it) add photos — and none of it counts against anyone's iCloud storage. Not yours, not theirs. Here's how to set one up from the Mac, and the compression trade-off that pays for the free ride.

Turn the feature on

1. Open Photos and press ⌘, for Settings.
2. In the iCloud tab, tick Shared Albums.

A Shared Albums section appears in the sidebar. (Unticking the box later removes shared albums from this Mac but doesn't delete them — they live in iCloud and reappear when you re-enable it.)

Create an album and invite people

1. Select some photos or videos in your library — the album can start with one item or a few hundred.
2. Click the Share button in the toolbar and choose Shared Albums, then New Shared Album.
3. Name it, and add invitees by their Apple ID email or phone number. You can add or remove people later, so the first guest list isn't binding.
4. Click Create. Invitees get a notification on all their Apple devices, and the album appears under Shared Albums in your sidebar, ready for more items.

Add more photos any time via the same Share-button route, or by dragging items onto the album in the sidebar. Right-click the album and choose its settings to manage two switches worth knowing:

• Subscribers Can Post — lets invitees add their own photos and videos. This is what makes a shared album a two-way pool for a trip or a family; leave it off for broadcast-style albums.
• Public Website — publishes the album at a public icloud.com link that anyone can view in a browser, no Apple account needed. Handy for the one relative on Android; exactly as public as it sounds.

Everyone can comment and "like" items, and subscribers' additions show up for the whole group with the contributor's name.

The fine print: compression and limits

The no-storage-cost deal is funded by downscaling. Photos in a shared album are reduced (long edge capped at 2048 pixels), and videos are compressed to 720p with a fifteen-minute maximum. That's fine for screens and phones, but it means a shared album is not a way to give someone your originals — for that, AirDrop the files or share an iCloud Drive folder. Albums also have hard caps (5,000 items per album), so a decades-long family album eventually needs a sequel.

One more consequence people miss: if a subscriber saves a photo out of a shared album, they're saving the compressed copy. The full-resolution original only exists with whoever contributed it. The other documented ceilings rarely bite but exist: up to 100 subscribers per album, and up to 200 shared albums per account — a family documenting every holiday since 2015 can genuinely hit that second one.

Managing, leaving, deleting

• Owner: right-click the album in the sidebar to open its settings — remove a subscriber, toggle posting, or Delete Shared Album. Deleting removes it for every participant; your own copies of photos you contributed stay in your library, but items others contributed disappear with the album, so save anything you want to keep first.
• Subscriber: the same right-click offers Unsubscribe, which removes the album from your devices and nothing from anyone else's.

Album vs. library: pick the right tool

Shared Albums are for moments — a trip, an event, a kid's year. If what you actually want is one ongoing collection a whole household maintains at full resolution, that's the other feature: iCloud Shared Photo Library, which shares originals and storage alike.