Family Photo Sharing Should be Easier Than It Is ⭐

We have our photos in Google Photos, Apple Photos, and elsewhere, and sharing that with the family should be easy. It’s not. The post Family Photo Sharing Should be Easier Than It Is ⭐ appeared first on Thurrott.com.

We have our photos in Google Photos, Apple Photos, and elsewhere, and sharing that with the family should be easier. But it’s not. And I find this confusing, especially given the family sharing capabilities that both companies offer via very expensive annual subscriptions I’m paying for. I belatedly started organizing my 2025 photos this morning, a task I undertake each year since I concluded my digital decluttering work in late 2023.

This time, I’m going to document exactly what I’m doing, since I didn’t do so last year and this is one of those unfamiliar enough things that I instantly forget what it is that I did. Granted, it’s easier now than ever before: My 2023 push involved decades of scanned photos from the pre-digital era and there was a lot of missing metadata (and still is, that’s the nature of this, sadly).

And a metric ton of photos, of course, over 130,000 through the end of 2023, anyway. 2024 and 2025 were, and are, a lot simpler, with the caveat that there are a lot of files, roughly 20,000 from each year over 50 GB of storage for each. I back up the photos I take with each phone to Google Photos, OneDrive, and, since I got the two NASes, to Synology Photos, too. On iPhones, I also back up to iCloud/Apple Photos.

And my wife backs up her phone to Google Photos, and we have a partnership set up (more on this below), so my Google Photos collection includes her photos (and vice versa). Given all that, when it comes to new photos, the closest thing I have to a “source of truth” is Google Photos because that’s where everything should be (and where most of our photos are). But that also explains why I have to do this annual cleanup work: I need to make sure that all our photos are everywhere, meaning in OneDrive, iCloud/Apple Photos, and Synology, too.

So this mini-consolidation involves doing a Google Takeout, which is problematic because there’s no way to filter that to just a single year, plus all the phone backups I make: Each time I move on from whatever phone, I copy all the photos I took off it manually just in case. (It occurs that it may be easier to just download the year’s worth of photos from the Google Photos website, tedious as that is.

But that’s not what I did.) It’s tempting to leave those backups as-is and maybe just put them up on one of the Synology NASes where they can replicate to the other, never to be seen again. And maybe I get there, but when I did this last year for the 2024 photos, I found several or even dozens that were only in one place (probably phone backups, mostly) and not in Google Photos, which was (and is) confusing.

So I am doing the full consolidation again this year, at least. Hopefully, this won’t be necessary going forward. 2025 is complicated further by all the phones I used last year. At one point or another, I used an Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 17 Pro Max, Google Pixel 9 Pro XL, Google Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL, Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and a Samsung Galaxy S25+. So I have the Google Takeout, which was originally massive until I trimmed it down to just the 2025 content, a more reasonable 55-ish GB, and then 8 manual phone backups.

9, really, since I also need to copy over my wife’s photos from her phone. It never ends. But once I figure this out, I’ll write a short follow-up explaining what I did to consolidate all the 2025 photos. Yes, I’m doing this as much for me as I am for anyone else: I will refer to it next year. A week ago Wednesday, my wife was texting with our daughter when she suddenly announced that she felt she needed to go visit her in North Carolina to help her out with some issues she was having with her apartment there.

We’re about a month into a four-month trip to Mexico, and this was unplanned, of course. But the calendar was pretty open, and that seemed fine to me. And then she surprised me by saying that she would leave the next day. I guess the tickets were no more expensive than had she waited several days for some reason. She could have even left that day. Yikes. Anyway, one week ago today, she flew to North Carolina, helped our daughter solve the apartment issues, and then flew back Monday.

I had the weekend to myself, which I mostly spent working on De-Enshittify Windows 11 and fielding questions about where my wife was from literally everyone I know here who I ran into during that time. I mention this only because when she was there, our daughter asked about a specific photo she remembers from a side-trip we took to Morocco during our home swap in Barcelona in 2014. (And I only know that date because I just looked it up.

The photos I took that summer were from a Nokia Lumia 1520. I know.) She wasn’t sure where she could look to find that photo, and when Stephanie tried Google Photos, she couldn’t find it either. Worse, my daughter (and son) didn’t have access to those photos regardless. All she could see was an album of favorite photos I had shared at one point. So when Stephanie got back from North Carolina, she mentioned this, and I told her I would just share the photos with the kids.

I was confused I hadn’t already done this. Then I looked at Google Photos and (re)discovered why I hadn’t already done this. No doubt, I had tried to do this previously. Google Photos lets you share your entire photo collection with one person and one person only via a feature called partner sharing. Naturally, I do this with my wife, and this is how we access all of each other’s photos automatically.

Partner sharing is a nice feature, but you can’t add multiple partners, which is odd, and there’s no sense of family sharing even though my Google One subscription (which gets me 2 TB of Google Drive/Photos storage) literally has a feature called Google One Family Sharing that supports up to five people. Perhaps tellingly, looking at that latter support document now, I can see that the term “photo” doesn’t even come up once.

Figuring I was missing something, I did the obvious “research,” meaning I Googled it. And I was surprised and disappointed to discover that there is no solution to this problem. All you can do with Google Photos is a thing I’d already done: You can create an album in Google Photos and then share that arbitrarily with other people. (Actually, there are other sharing features in Google Photos for things like memories, but the shared album bit is the closest to what I want.) Fine, I thought.

I will just make an album that represents all my photos in Google Photos, now and in the future, and share that with the kids. But no. (And I likely tried that before as well.) As it turns out, when you create an album in Google Photos, your only choices are to select people and/or pets, which can be an auto-updating album, or to manually select the photos you wish to share. Both are a non-starter because there is no way to select all photos in either case, and the latter choice is even worse because it won’t auto-update as new photos are added.

This is astonishing to me. If you think about the point of Google Photos or any photo experience like this, sharing is a key feature, an obvious feature. And while I sort of understand why family sharing wasn’t originally a feature of Google Photos, I have an expensive Google One subscription with family sharing now. How the frick does that not give me the ability to share my entire photo collection?

That makes zero sense. Our kids both use iPhones, and our daughter also have a MacBook Air. I have multiple Apple devices, including an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, an Apple Watch, two Apple TVs, AirPods Pro 3 earbuds, Beats Studio Pro ANC headphones, two HomePod speakers (in PA), and two HomePod Mini speakers (here in Mexico). And now even my wife, a resolute Samsung/Android user, has an iPad Mini on which she reads Apple News each morning.

We’re perhaps not the most traditional of Apple households–I very much prefer Windows to the Mac, for starters–but I can certainly justify an expensive Apple One subscription. And so we have that, and I share it with the kids and, now, my wife. I guess I assumed that full access to my photo collection in iCloud/Apple Photos was just part of this subscription and the family sharing I had enabled.

But then I looked at that. And as with Google Photos, two things became clear. I had looked at this before and the solution Apple, in this case, was offering was not ideal. Which explains why the kids didn’t have access to our (nearly) entire photo collection through Apple either. (One of the issues with iCloud/Apple Photos is that all the Android-based photos my wife and I take will not end up there unless I make that happen manually.

Again, this is part of the reason for my annual photo collection consolidation.) The way family sharing works over in Apple-land is that you share basically everything in Apple One, so in my case, that’s Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple News+, and 2 TB of iCloud+ storage. Photos are not automatically shared, which makes sense: The kids are both taking photos on their iPhones and using some of that 2 TB of iCloud+ storage, but those are their photos and I can’t access them in any way.

However, anyone with iCloud+ can share photos with others in the family (and, I assume, otherwise). From a family sharing perspective, you can just share albums, as you can with Google Photos. Or, you can share your entire photo library, which is what I was looking for. So that was one step forward. But there’s just one problem: When you enable this feature, “all participants can add, edit, and delete content.” This means that my kids (or wife) could delete photos from the collection, which is obviously not ideal.

And explains, I think, why I never enabled this previously. Well, I did enable it this time. It’s not exactly what I want, of course, but I trust everyone not to delete photos and Apple iCloud/Photos isn’t my “source of truth,” anyway. That’s Google Photos for now, and probably Synology Drive going forward. Not that it matters too much, since part of the point of this mini-consolidation is to align all the content everywhere again.

Thinking about this, it occurs to me that I could have perhaps made this work through some other service, like OneDrive. And I could look into that, I guess, except that my kids do not use OneDrive and forcing them to install and configure this app so they can see photos feels wrong, especially when those photos are already in services they do use. Plus, OneDrive photo backup is often behind because I don’t access the app that often and it won’t back up until I do.

Likewise, I will probably get Synology Photos to the point where it can be the source of truth, so to speak. But there, too, the kids would need to install that app, and I would have to configure user accounts for them on the NAS. And maybe we get there. Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

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