Apple has sneakily made changes to the shared iCloud Photos album in the name of an ‘upgrade,’ which could be worse than you think!
If you have used Shared Albums in the past, you know that an album can have up to 5000 photos and videos, and most importantly, they don’t count towards your own iCloud storage limit (which may be 5 GB or whatever iCloud+ or Apple One plan you have subscribed to).
This fact is also prominently displayed on Apple’s website, as evidenced by the screenshot below.
But all this is about to change in the name of ‘upgrade.’
Backstory…
I have been using shared iCloud albums since 2014, and I still have the albums I created in the erstwhile iPhoto app on my MacBook Pro.
As mentioned, photos saved in these old shared albums still appear on all my devices decades later and don’t count toward my iCloud storage.
After installing iOS 27 developer beta on my iPhone, I went to the Shared Albums section of the Photos app, and I noticed a couple of things I don’t like.
Upgrade Shared Album: This is a trick to lose free storage!
This option seems positive and something you will be enticed to activate for your existing shared album; after all, who doesn’t like an upgrade!
But there is a catch.
If you start editing your existing/old shared album and tap the ‘Upgrade Shared Album,’ a screen tells you the benefits in big words that you will now be able to share full-resolution photos and videos, or share the invitation using other apps like WhatsApp. All this sounds great.
But down in a small text, it also says that “the owner of the shared album will provide iCloud storage for any new items added to this shared album.”
This means shared albums are no longer free as far as cloud storage is concerned. Instead, it will count towards your iCloud storage, which is a massive downgrade. If it didn’t count towards the original album creator’s iCloud space, there would have been no need to put this disclaimer!
In other words, no more free storage to share photos long term without eating up your iCloud space!
And remember, Apple already does things like enabling iCloud Photos and iPhone backups by default, so you quickly fill your iCloud storage and then pay them a monthly fee to keep using iCloud (more on it in 19 things I dislike about Apple). If you don’t pay or free up space, features like iCloud Notes won’t sync across devices, and you won’t even be able to send or receive emails on your iCloud Mail account.
Share Albums now need iCloud Photos to be turned on
Since I won’t ‘upgrade’ (read downgrade for me) my existing shared iCloud albums until Apple forces me, I thought of creating a new one in the Photos app on my iPhone running iOS 27.
Like the good old days, I didn’t want to nuke this shared album after 30 days, so I tried turning off the “Make Album Temporary” switch, but it nudged me to activate iCloud Photos, which again makes it clear that if you want to create long-term shared albums, you’ll have to allocate space for it in your existing iCloud storage. No more free cloud storage!
Back in the day, you could create new shared albums without having to activate iCloud Photos.
Of course, Apple is still generous enough to let you create a shared album for free for 30 days without requiring you to activate iCloud Photos and without consuming your iCloud storage (similarly, it offers unlimited iCloud storage for creating a full device backup, so you can upgrade to a new iPhone). But remember to ask your friends and family, with whom you have shared the album, to save the photos to their devices within 30 days, or else they will be deleted.
I don’t use iCloud Photos on my devices (I have my reasons, which I will share in another post), so I can’t create permanent shared iCloud albums anymore, as I have been able to do for more than a decade.
Apple, please stop messing up things we love…
Apple is doing very well financially. Customers consistently rate them very highly on satisfaction surveys. Still, the company does everything it can to squeeze as much as possible from its users. Changes to old features like this one feel unnecessary and ultimately make the experience more frustrating for loyal consumers.
What do you think about this new change?
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