How to use Shared Albums? Google Photos VS Apple Photos Features and Tutorial

8 February 2023 by

Daisy Wong

Smartphones have gradually replaced cameras as a tool for people to record their daily lives. The photos and videos taken are often shared with family and friends. Sharing life moments is one of the best ways to express love and maintain healthy relationships. Sharing photos and videos is not difficult as long as you make good use of online photo albums.

What is the purpose of sharing albums?

When travelling abroad or attending events such as parties and weddings, the photos and videos taken by each person's mobile phone are eventually shared with family, friends and travelling companions. However, sending the files one by one is tiresome and time-consuming because each person's telephone operating system might not be the same. Online photo albums provide a platform for sharing, and saving photos and videos, so that everyone can browse download the memories at any time.

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Features of Google Photos Shared Albums

Google Photos is a cloud service launched by Google. It has been an independent service since 2015. It can store photos and videos with the following features:

Multi-platform and OS: Not limited to the type of operating system on the device, Google Photos services and features make it easy to back up and share photos and videos.
Entire albums can be shared: When sharing photos, you can choose to share a single photo or create a new album to share with others. It is also convenient to share a collection of photos with a group.
Photos will not lose quality: Photos backed up to Google Photos will not lose quality, and you can choose between original quality (no additional compression) or ‘High Quality’ which is lossless compression.
Auto-categorised photos: Google Photos has a powerful, smart-organisation feature that automatically categorises photos via machine learning keying off of identified faces or scene detection.
Search photos by text: Google Photos has an intelligent search function. The system will automatically analyse memories once they have been backed up to the cloud. These photos and videos will be assigned keywords, such as "travel", "food", "sea", etc. You can quickly find the photo you need in your album by searching the keywords.
Intelligent recognition and sharing: Google Photos provides a "Partner Sharing" feature. When you share an album with others, the system can use Google's facial recognition technology to automatically identify photos and videos to share any new photos with your friends (up to 10 face-related photos)

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Features of Apple iCloud and Apple Photos Online Photo Album App

iCloud is a platform developed by Apple to store photos, videos, music, files, contacts and calendars. It is a built-in feature of iOS devices and features the following:

Rock Solid up-time: Photos stored on iOS devices can be fully synchronised and backed up to iCloud in real time
Not friendly to devices with non-iOS system: Non-iOS users cannot share photos directly through the iCloud application, but can access data in iCloud through a browser

Apple Photos

Shared albums do not take up your own iCloud storage space: If iPhone users share photos and videos with friends and relatives on iOS devices, they only need to create a shared album in the "Gallery" app without taking up their iCloud storage and all users in the shared album can also upload photos.
iPhone Shared Albums compress photos and videos: The photos and videos will be compressed to the specified size and quality, the long edge of shared photos will be reduced to 2,048 pixels
iCloud's limitations: For instance, you can only upload a maximum of 1,000 photos or videos to a shared album per hour, and the daily upload limit is 10,000 items; and a single account can only hold a maximum of 200 shared albums. Each album has a limit of 5,000 items and can be shared with up to 100 people.

Comparison of the maximum capacity of shared albums

Apart from some of the limitations listed above, there is no official capacity limit for iPhone Shared Albums. However, you only receive 5GB of free storage per account, and you have to pay a monthly subscription for additional space. Google Photos offers monthly and yearly plans for various capacities and offers 15GB of free space.

	Free Storage Capacity	Price for Extra Storage
Google Photos	15GB	100GB：Monthly $15 / Annual $150 200GB：Monthly $23 / Annual $230 2TB：Monthly $79 / Annual $799
iCloud	5GB	50GB：Monthly $8 200GB：Monthly $23 2TB：Annual $78

What Digital Formats are Accepted?

💽 SD/SM/MMC/CF/CDROM/DVD

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Google Photos Tutorial

How to create and share Google Photos?

Download and install the Google Photos app
Sign in with Google Account
Click "Photo" at the bottom of the screen
Select photos or videos to add to the album
Click the "+" icon at the top of the screen and click "Shared Album"
Set a title for the album and complete the creation of the album
Click "Share" and choose who to share with
Album creators can share Google Photos directly with contacts with Google Accounts, or search for people to share with by email address or phone number
To share content with other users, create a sharing link to share the album link with others

Get Ready For Google Photos

How to share in Google Photos?

Users who have been invited to share specific Google Photos will receive email notifications. Also, the existing users of Google Photos will receive notification messages and push notifications from the Google Photos app, or they can browse the albums by sharing a link to content. All invited users can upload photos or videos to the shared album.

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Apple Photos Tutorial

How to share albums on iPhone?

Go to the "Album" app and click "Add"
Click "Add Shared Album" and name the album
Select people to invite from your contacts, or enter an email address, or iMessage phone number
After creating an album, open the shared album, click "+" or "Select", you can select the photos and videos to be added to the album, and click "Publish"

How to Participate in iPhone Shared Albums

When the owner of the shared album enables the "Subscribers can publish" setting, people who are invited to share the album can upload photos and videos. Invitees can access the shared albums to enter the Albums app.

Digitise your precious photos now!

If you still have albums and old photos, Capture.HK provides photo album digitisation service, which can efficiently digitise photos for you. Not only browsing photos on electronic devices, but also sharing with family and friends via shared photo albums. So that precious photos can be passed down. To ensure that no photos are taken out of your album or touched during the digitisation process, we utilise a non-touch method and special digitisation technology.

In addition, we upload digitised photos to Google Photos, no matter which operating system electronic device you use, you can check out the touching moments with your loved ones anytime, anywhere, with family and friends in a few simple steps. Photos stored in Google Photos are never lost due to electronic device damage or loss. Google Photos is a reliable tool to keep precious memories safe.

Learn more about our photo album digitisation service now!

*This article is brought to you by Capture HK.

Capture HK is the premier analogue media digitisation company in Hong Kong.

Capture HK's business covers photographs, photo album digitisation, videotapes digitisation, including VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS-C Hi-8, Video8, Digital8, DV, DVCAM, MiniDV, DVC and digital media digitisation, including Secure Digital (SD), Smart Media (SM), MultiMediaCard (MMC) Compact Flash (CF), xD-Picture Card, Memory Stick, USB Drive, CDROM, DVD.

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