LETTER OF THE MONTH

I’m really surprised that you wrote in the May 2021 issue on page 19 that “you can’t decide to upload some but not all of your photos — it is an all–or–nothing deal.” Then you go on to describe how to create shared photo albums. Shared Albums is in fact exactly how you upload only some of your photos to iCloud. This is how I have been sharing my reference photos for watercolor paintings to and from iPhone, iPad, and iMac. You simply create a shared photo album that only you use. It’s very simple: In your iCloud settings for Photos, skip over iCloud Photos and My Photo Stream; just enable Shared Albums. Then create a Shared Album and add only the images you need in iCloud. They will then appear in the same shared album on all your devices. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to upload all their photos to iCloud since it’s now so easy to create numerous useless photos. Shared Albums is the way to put only your best into a potentially costly storage solution. I’ve been doing this for years and have yet to exceed my free iCloud storage.

ANN NUNZIATA

It’s a good tip, Ann, and you can absolutely use Shared Albums if you so wish without using up your iCloud allowance, because photos stored in these albums don’t count towards your iCloud storage limit. However, this clever workaround does come with a few caveats. Firstly, it’s a manual process, so if you take lots of photos or videos on your iPhone, you’ll have to regularly move them to the right folder yourself, first copying them across and then deleting them afterwards. To make this process less painful, you could always just do this once a year, or whenever you hit your free storage limit. Second, each album has a limit of 5,000 photos and videos, and there’s a limit of 200 albums, though admittedly this would still give you plenty of storage space to work with. Obviously, the easy solution would be just to buy more storage space, but Ann’s idea is definitely worth trying!