Understand Sharing in Google Photos

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll discuss my understanding of how sharing works in Google Photos.

Like many of you, Google Photos is my choice for cloud-based photo storage, but I've always found that one of the more confusing and convoluted aspects of the service is how you share photos with others.   There are quite a few options, each of which has slightly different features and drawbacks.  Let's go through them one at a time.

Share a copy of photo

This is by far the way I share photos most frequently.  Say for example, you have a funny pet photo that you want to share with a friend on text or email.  You can go into the Google Photos app, find the photo, and hit the Share button.  Now, you can see that Google Photos is encouraging you to share with others who have a Google account -- those people are all listed down here -- we will come back to that in a second.  For now, hit "Share to. . ." and then you can choose to send this specific photo by text, email or AirDrop.  You can see that I'm accessing Google Photos from an iPhone, but I'm imagining that this works similarly on an Android.  You can also -- and I use this quite a bit -- choose to copy the photo down here, which adds the photo to your clipboard.  Then you can paste it into a document or another app.  This screen also allows you to open a copy of this photo in another app like Google Drive or Evernote.  A less direct way to do this, if you are having a hard time getting the photo to paste or open in another app, is to save the photo to your Camera Roll and share from there.  To do this, come back to the photo and swipe up to reveal more option and choose Download.  Then you can go into your Camera Roll and share directly from there.  Okay -- so that was sharing a copy of a photo or photos.  Now let's go back to what Google Photos is encouraging us to do --  

Share a photo by account

Remember when we hit the Share button, we were presented with the option to share with these contacts who have Google accounts.  For whatever reason, they changed the interface recently to push this method of sharing.  So, if you share this way to an individual person, you essentially create an album with that person, which you then add to whenever you share photos with that person.  That means that, even though your friend will get a notification that they have a photo that has been shared with them, they will only be able to see that photo in the Google Photos app or website.  Perhaps it is nice to have all of your photos that you have shared gathered in one place, but I don't like having this one on one sharing clutter up my albums.  That said, you may find that you prefer this for people in your lives who also use Google Photos quite a bit.  Okay -- what if you have a whole album to share?   There are a couple of options for that too and they are somewhat similar to your options for sharing individual photos.  The first way is to share your

Album by account

Through their interface, Google is encouraging us to share our photos to others using their Google accounts.  Basically, you create an album by selecting multiple photos and hitting the Plus symbol.  Now Google gives you two options, which I think are incredibly confusing.  You can create an Album or you can create a Shared Album.  It makes it seem like these are two totally different things, but really they aren't and you can make a regular Album into a Shared Album at any point.  I think this is a bizarre way to handle it.  The only difference that I can see is that with a Shared Album you have to go through an extra step of adding contacts immediately to share with.  There is also some speculation online that if you create a Shared Album, you can't add original size photos, but I didn't confirm this.  At any rate, I generally don't know right away who I'm sharing with, so I choose to create an Album and THEN, once it's created, I go in and hit the Share button to add people with Google accounts to make it shared.  What is nice about sharing an album like this is that, as you add photos to the album, your friends and family will be notified.  If you click up here on the Shared Albums icon, any album you have shared OR has been shared with you will be shown here.  As photos are added, the album name will be bolded letting you know which albums have been updated.  My dad created an album like this to share with my grandma and filled it weekly with photos of his grandkids and the flora and fauna in his backyard.  It allowed her to not just see the most recent photos, but also go back through and enjoy the older photos.  I have an ongoing album that I share with my art group to share whatever we are working on -- and since I have set the album settings to allow any member to add photos, each of us is notified when the album is updated.  Sharing photo albums this way creates a more historic and ongoing way to communicate by image.  And finally, you can always share an

Album by link

Again, this option is somewhat buried since Google is actively encouraging us to share by account, but I use this method far more.  This is the way you can share multiple photos with people who don't necessarily have a Google account and don't need to add their own photos.   First, you'll need to put your photos into an album.  Then go into the album, hit the 3 dots, and from here select Options.  Now go down and turn on "Link Sharing."  You can only do this if you are the owner or creator of the album.  Turning link sharing on allows anyone with the link to see the photos without having to log in or join the album.  Now hit the Copy Link button and then you can share this by text, email, or however you want.  In addition, once you've turned on Link Sharing, you can see this little link symbol here, which can take you directly to the Options page to copy the link.  I use this for social events where I want to share photos with the attendees like our annual dance party or big birthday outings for friends.  I also make sure that I go into Options and turn on Colaborate so that other people can add their photos and videos as well if they have joined the album by account.   The nice thing is that you can have a combination of people viewing the album by link (for those who don't have Google accounts and don't want to join the album) and those who want to collaborate more fully by joining the album by account. 

I hope that all makes sense.  It's confusing and not presented as well as it could be in the app, but the options are useful once you know how they work.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!