Family Sharing Photo Workflow

April 14, 2024 12:15 PM

I take pictures on my phone. My wife takes pictures on her phone. I'm looking for a way to merge these pictures automatically into one shared photo album that I can back up, share, and otherwise tinker with. Any ideas?

We're expecting a baby this summer, and it's got me thinking of how I want to organize family photos. We're both using iphones, if that matters. Curious for tips or thoughts about how you've managed multi-user photo libraries to make sure everything important ends up in the same spot.

Bonus question: what's your preferred app for sharing photos with extended family?

posted by soonertbone to Technology (6 answers total)

Apple has photo storage/sharing at iCloud Photos. That would seem to be the simplest way to do it since you're both already on iPhone. In fact, your phones are quite possibly already backing up to iCloud. They also have a Shared iCloud Photos option. And you can share them with others.
posted by Meldanthral at 1:17 PM on April 14

If your extended family are iPhone users, a shared album in the default photos app works pretty well- it’s what we use for sharing pictures with our son’s grandparents (we also post things on social media, but we use the shared album a lot more). Anyone can share to the album and they can like and comment on the photos, which is nice.
posted by MadamM at 1:18 PM on April 14

I would go with two different family share plans. If you're already an Amazon Prime subscriber I would use Amazon and Apple, and I would recommend Amazon and Google for android folks. That gives you a bit of coverage should one of them change terms or get otherwise unpleasant. All of them offer plenty of storage for a reasonable cost and auto-uploading / syncing if you want. I think that Amazon actually has the best interface for finding old photos, but they're really all quite good.
posted by true at 4:45 PM on April 14

I am not sure about how effective it would be on an iPhone, but I set up a new Gmail account for the sole purpose of photo combining and me and my ex both logged into the account on our respective phones and set Google photos to use the account by default and to back up to the cloud so that both of our photos went into the same account and thus one place. I think there is an easier way to just share one person's photos with the other, but this worked.

I also back up to Amazon Prime, but not sure how to share those as easily.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:45 PM on April 14 [1 favorite]

Google Photos has a partner sharing option under settings. My wife and I share all our photos, since the majority are of our kiddo or of things we do together. This might not work if you have/take other photos you don't want to share with your partner or that might clutter things up. What we like about it is that we don't have to move or share separate albums and can then take the other person's photo and share it to family or friends or make a photo album without having to ask the spouse for access.
posted by carrioncomfort at 6:28 AM on April 15

Our family uses a shared Google photos album for just this purpose. Bonus feature that I stumbled upon - if one of the family pay the extra $ for the cloud space upgrade, the remaining empty space can be shared with all family members!

One small down check is that the very nice AI image search in your personal library isn't enabled in the shared group library.
posted by erebora at 4:41 PM on April 15