How to Share All Your Google Photos with Your Family

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I share all of my Google Photos with my family.

Recently I started asking myself this somewhat morbid question -- now that most of us keep our photos digitally and not physically, what happens to them when we aren't around to log into our accounts anymore?  It used to be that relatives would go back through shoe boxes full of photos to pass them down through posterity.  That's how we get these gems from my family's archives.  But things are different now.  We don't print out our photos.  We don't put them in albums or in shoeboxes.  They are kept in our iCloud accounts, Google Photos account, or just sitting on our phones.  How do we ensure that our photos don't just *poof* disappear when we do?  

I'm the photo taker in my nuclear family and I organize them through Google Photos.  I have lots of ways that I use those photos -- you can see my video on that if you are interested -- but I rarely just print out a bunch of photos to put in an album.  Thus -- everything is kept up in the cloud.  And up until now, I'm the sole person with access to those photos -- with the exception of a couple of shared albums.  Over the past week, I've changed that.

First of all, Google Photos has an option to share your entire photo library with one partner.  You can also filter the images to only images of specific people or only images after a certain date.  Not surprisingly, I chose my husband as my partner and opted to share my entire photo library with him.  To do this, go into photos, click on the little conversation bubble icon in the upper left hand corner.  This is the new icon for Shared folders.  Then I walked through the simple process of adding a partner account.  Just remember, whoever you choose as a partner has to also have a Google account.  Now, when he logs into his Google Photos account, he can see my entire Photo Album in his Sharing section.  It will always be there as long as I keep him as my partner, but I don't believe it takes up space on his Google Photos account UNLESS he decides to Add this to his library, in which case all 40 GB of my photos will be taking up space in his account.  Also, he won't be able to search my photos as long as they stay in the Sharing space.  He will need to add them to his library to search AND my facial recognition tags don't port over, he will have to tag people all over again if he wants to search by person.

Okay, so now my husband has access to all of my photos.  This is not something I even need to maintain since as I continue to add photos, he will have access to those as well.  However, as much as I love my husband, in my absence he is probably NOT going to be the one making slideshows, putting together family histories, or sharing archived photos.  So, I really also want to share all of my photos with both of my teenage kids.  Do I think they will use them now?  Probably not, but there are thousands of pictures from their childhoods and they should have access to them throughout the course of their lives.  This is when things get tricky, since you can only identify one partner in Google Photos.  AND Google Photos does not allow you to share your entire collection of photos.  BUT you can share albums, one at a time.  

Okay -- so I keep all of my photos in quarterly albums.  That means that there are 4 albums per calendar year.  2020 Q1 covers photos from January to March, 2020 Q2 those from April to June and so forth.  So, my albums (under Library) look like this.  I do this for a variety of reasons, including the way that I back up my photos, but this ALSO gives me a way to share them.  So, I went back and ensured that each of my photos was included in a quarterly album.  Then I set about sharing every album with my four family members.  I didn't really need to do this for my husband, since he already has access to my whole library as a partner, but I threw him in for good measure.  Since I acquired my first digital camera in late 2001, my quarterly folders start about there.  So I have over 80 chronological albums to share.  You can make life a little easier and have fewer albums to share by grouping your photos by year, but that's entirely up to you.  

In order to share, click to open an album and choose the share button or plus sign to select the people you want to share with and hit Send.  A couple of notes -- there is no way to prevent emails from being sent each time you share an album, so you should let your family know that they are about to be flooded with emails.  Also, every person you share with needs to have their own Google account.  And just as in the partner account, these albums will show up in the Sharing section of their Google Photos.  They will not be able to search them or tag for facial recognition unless they choose to add the album to their Library by hitting the Save photos button.  But once they do -- that album will start to take up space, which will go towards their Google Drive storage limits.  

And finally, let me tell you about one very vexing issue that I ran into while doing this to hopefully spare you some frustration.  I had over 80 albums to share and was clipping right along when I started to get this error "Trouble Sending Photos.  Try again later."  I was right around halfway through when this error popped up and prevented me from sharing additional photos.  This took days of troubleshooting and research, but what I learned was that I was able to continue to share with my son and husband's account, but not with my daughter's.  Something funny was going on with her account.  Fortunately, I was able to check out her account and it turns out that with my son and husband, I was just sending a shared albums -- no need for them to do anything.  But with her account, I was sending an invitation to share, which she needed to accept.  In her account, each of those albums showed up with a button that she needed to click in order to accept the invitation.  Why did her account do this and my son and husband's did not?  I have no idea.  From what I could tell, there was nothing different about her account nor about what I was doing.  It's a mystery.  What I figured out though was that you can only have a certain number of pending invitations before that account starts to reject other sharing invites.  So, once I had her go in and accept the album invites, I was able to share with her again.  I still don't know why it was happening, but at least I figured out how to fix it.  

And that it.  I have also shared my username and password for my Google account with my family, so they have access to everything I have access to, but by sharing all of the photos in my album, they have access to them directly through their own accounts.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.