iCloud Shared Photo Library
Passwords are rubbish, which is why Safari does something smarter
iPadOS 16 introduces a much easier way to share images with your nearest and dearest, or indeed with anybody else you fancy inviting: the iCloud Shared Photo Library. This invitation-only library enables you to manually share specific photos or automatically share everything with up to five other people, and they can add their own images to the shared library or edit and even delete yours. The feature requires everybody to be using the most up-to-date OS for their device, currently iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura. At the time of writing, Apple had announced plans to bring iCloud shared libraries to Windows PCs too via its Photos app for Windows 11.
The previous Shared Albums feature hasn’t gone anywhere, but iCloud Shared Photo Library is more trusting of the people you share it with. Everybody with access to this new library has the same level of permissions, so if you don’t want the kids drawing moustaches on photos of you or deleting the shots they don’t like then you might want to think twice about using this option over the normal Shared Albums feature. For the same reasons, if you want to share albums publicly rather than with just your five trusted people, Shared Albums remains the safest way to do it; it doesn’t let others edit or delete the pictures and enables you to share publicly rather than just to specific people.
Once you’ve set up the shared library you can decide whether you want to see its contents integrated with the rest of your Photos library, or you can view each library individually; pressing on the ‘…’ icon at the top right – gives you a choice of Personal Library, Shared Library or Both.
It’s important to note that whoever set up the iCloud Shared Library is the one whose iCloud storage is being used for its images, even if they’re added by other people you’ve invited. And for other users, deleting an image doesn’t necessarily mean permanent deletion; the Library creator, most likely you, is notified of deletions as they happen unless you disable that option in Settings > Photos > Shared Library. You’ll then be given the option of moving the deleted image to your Personal Library instead. Deleted images also remain in the Recently Deleted folder for 30 days unless that folder is emptied manually.
Passwords have been with us since long before computers were even a twinkle in Charles Babbage’s eye. They haven’t aged well; they’ve become so complex that we need iCloud Keychain to manage them, and even then websites keep leaking them to the baddies and undoing all our best efforts to make them completely incomprehensible. Enter Passkeys, which are designed to change all that.
Passkeys are a new way of identifying yourself to online sites and services, and in Safari they are very simple to use; when you’re creating a login for a site that supports Passkeys, Safari will ask if you want to create one and then ask you to use Touch ID to confirm you’re you. That then generates a unique, encrypted identifier that tells the site that you’re not an impostor. It’s much more secure than a password and pretty much useless to anyone who manages to intercept it.
The only real downside to passkeys is that they’re tied to your devices. With passwords, you can log in to something with your user ID and password even if you don’t have your iPhone handy; with passkeys, you’ll need to have your iPhone, iPad or Mac with you to authenticate the new device. It works very much like the authentication you get when you try to log into iCloud on a new device, where Apple asks you to input the code it’s sent to one of your trusted devices. No code means no entry.
This is still a relatively new technology but it’s been embraced not just by Apple but by Google and Microsoft too. We should see a lot more passkey-supporting websites and apps in the coming months.