Avoid (or prefer) sharing photos from Camera with your group

I started seeing pictures in Photos that I was sure I didn’t take recently, but often of locations I knew vaguely. After a few days, I realized the issue: my older child, in college on the East Coast, and currently traveling during spring break, had a Camera setting that caused all their images to blend into a shared family library.

Fortunately, our kid is old enough, wise enough—and communicative enough with us parents—that I didn’t see anything they didn’t want me to see, but it is the kind of thing that could be awkward in some shared groups.

The issue is that the Camera app has a tiny icon that’s easy to tap and activate without realizing it. That button’s activation is then persistent for all subsequent photos you take!

Here’s how to work with this feature intentionally, and deactivate it if you never want to use it—with purpose or not!

Share with those who care

The iCloud Shared Photo Library is an oddball: you can create or belong to one, and one only, and it can be shared with the creator plus five others, who don’t need to be in your Family Sharing group, if you have one.1 The thing that you create is called Shared Library throughout the interface.

Once you’ve created or joined a Shared Library, its availability appears in Photos on your devices with iCloud Photos enabled and, more subtly, in Camera. If you’re viewing both libraries in Photos, images from the Shared Library have the Shared Library two-person icon overlaid in the upper-right corner; videos, for some reason, do not.

A pop-up menu appears in Photos for Mac that lets you choose whether to see your Personal Library, Shared Library, or both.

On a Mac, Photos: Settings: Shared Library reveals participants and offers a Shared Library Suggestions checkbox. Enable this if you’d like your Mac to say, “Hey, maybe you should add this image to the Shared Library!” (I didn’t find this particularly useful, and disabled it.)

Go to Settings: Apps: Photos, and you’ll note an extra option on iPhones and iPads: Sharing from Camera. That’s the culprit in my offspring’s openness.

Keep Camera shots your own (or not)

You can tap Sharing from Camera or go directly to Settings > Camera: Shared Library: Sharing from Camera. With Sharing from Camera enabled, you see a yellow icon of two people side-by-side in the upper-left corner of the screen in portrait mode or the lower-left corner in landscape. Tap it to disable directly from Camera. A yellow label appears at the top of the Camera interface to indicate which library is in effect after you tap the button. When Sharing from Camera isn’t turned on, the icon appears with a line through it.

When you activate the two-person icon, the Shared Library label appears (highlighted here with an added red box).

The setting is persistent within Camera, so each time you open Camera, your previous Shared Library choice remains. You can override this via Settings or by tapping the icon again.

If you never want to enable Shared Library by accident or intentionally, disable Sharing from Camera in the Photos: Sharing from Camera settings.2

If you found you put media in the Shared Library and want to return them to your own, you can fix this quite easily:

On a Mac, select the items in Photos, and choose Image: Move X Photo(s)/Video(s) to Personal Library. You can also Control/right-click on any item in the selection.

On an iPhone or iPad, go to the Library view in Photos, tap Select, and choose one or more items. Tap the More … icon at upper-right, and choose Move to Personal Library.

In a bit of turnabout, a few days after writing this column, I get a text from my youth: “Your photos seem to be going into my account. I think you pressed the share button in the app by accident.” D’oh!

For further reading

Our very own leader, Jason Snell, has a book that covers Shared Library and much more. Pick up a copy of Take Control of Photos to get up to speed on this and other quirky Photos features.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Shared Library requires iOS 16.1 or iPadOS 16. or later, or macOS 10.13 Ventura or later. iCloud Photos must be enabled on each participating device. People under 13 can only join (or create) a Shared Library with Family Group members. ↩

There’s a Share Automatically option that puts photos you take with Camera in the Shared Library whenever participants in the Shared Library are recognized while taking the picture. ↩