This is a long article, but trust me, if you have more than one photo library between your family Macs and you are constantly trying to keep them current, this is the article for you. If you think this might be the answer you’ve been looking for, it would be best to do the steps on your mac as you read or even re-read the article.
The hoarders of photos have spent centuries trying to solve the problem of domestic image distribution. It started with those garishly covered albums that had the cardboard pages. All the photos were locked behind magically sticky sheets of plastic that were, as it turned out, turning all our photos yellow.
Someone, usually your grandmother, would have all these albums on a shelf, and the only way to look at these in peace was to steal them and take them home. That was the first, if not slightly immoral, form of sharing.
A few years later, when all photos went digital, we were given the Shared Album feature. This allowed holiday snaps to reside on your Mac and then ‘share’ them with victims who went on the same trip… or to friends who weren’t there but pretended to be interested in your trip to the pencil museum. The end result was you ended up with your main library full of the photos you took, along with the same photos they took and an album that was destined in a few years to be greeted with “What the hell is this?” before you deleted it.
Then Apple finally put their top engineers in a room, gave them espresso, and built the Shared iCloud Photo Library on the Mac.
Now, on a phone, this is a handy little feature. But on a Mac, with a proper display and a keyboard, it is not merely a software update. It is an all-singing, all-dancing nuclear command centre of family photo dominance.
Here is how you build it from your desktop, step by step, without destroying your sanity or photo library.
Ensure macOS is up to date by clicking on the Apple menu () in the top-left corner of your screen and select System Settings, then General, then Software Update. Make sure your Mac is running macOS Ventura or later. If you attempt this on ancient software, the machine will simply laugh at you and refuse to cooperate.
Then launch the Photos app on your Mac and click on the Photos menu then choose Settings.
Click on the Shared Library tab at the top of the window, then click Get Started and then Add Participants.
Click Add Participants and enter the Apple ID email addresses or phone numbers of up to five family members or friends. Choose wisely. These people will have equal rights to edit, favourite, and ruthlessly delete your photographs.
This is the moment of maximum peril. The Mac asks what you would like to dump into the shared pool:
- All My Photos and Videos: The nuclear option. Every photo you have taken since the dawn of digital time instantly enters the shared vault.
- By Date or People: The sensible choice. Share photos only from a specific date forward or containing specific family members.
- Manually: For those discerning few who wish to pick items one by one later (which actually might be safer).
Review your selection in the preview pane. Take a deep breath, click Invite via Messages.
Look at the top left of the Photos app toolbar. A new dropdown menu appears, allowing you to toggle instantly between Both Libraries, Personal Library, or Shared Library.
The Rules of Engagement
Once configured, watching high-resolution photographs taken by your spouse three hundred miles away materialise in real-time on a desktop screen is nothing short of sorcery.
However, you must understand that this system operates on total, unyielding symmetry. Every single person invited to that shared vault has the absolute power to edit, caption, favourite, or completely obliterate any photograph inside it. If your spouse decides your double chin looks slightly too prominent in a holiday snap, they can crop it on their laptop, and you will be cropped on every screen in the hemisphere within three seconds.
If a relative deletes a batch of family portraits, those photos do not quietly hibernate in a corner; they vanish across all devices simultaneously.
It requires absolute, unshakeable, terrifying trust. But once you have configured it from the comfort of your desktop, you will never again have to endure the agonising sentence: “Can you email me that picture from three Tuesdays ago?”
Moving photos between your Personal Library and Shared Library in the Mac Photos app is straightforward.
- Open the Photos app on your Mac.
- Select the photos or videos you want to move (hold Cmd while clicking to select multiple items).
- Right-click (Control-click) on the selected photos and choose Move to Shared Library (or Move to Personal Library).
Important Things to Keep in Mind
- Permissions: Once a photo is moved to the Shared Library, every member can view, edit, favourite, or delete it.
- iCloud Storage: Photos in the Shared Library count toward the iCloud storage quota of the library creator, not the person who uploaded or moved the photo.
- Original Quality: Moving photos between libraries retains the full, uncompressed original file quality and metadata (location, date, time).
If you have two or more Macs and each have their own photo library and you struggle to make them the same this really is the best way to amalgamate them across all devices. By way of an example, on the weekend I took a heap of photos and was able to simply add them to the shared library and they appeared on my wife’s computer instantly and she only had to ask me once!
