Complete Guide to the Latest iCloud Shared Albums Updates in iOS 27

Although Apple is bringing some big AI changes to Photos in iOS 27, there’s one other enhancement that’s flying a bit more under the radar as it’s as much a change on the back end as in the Photos app itself — but it’s also much more significant than it sounds at first glance.

During its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last month, Apple’s Stacey Ford briefly mentioned that Shared Albums would be getting two big improvements for broader and higher-quality sharing:

However, what she didn’t mention was how Apple is overhauling the entire Shared Album experience under the hood to deliver these two changes.

There’s more going on here than just flipping a switch to allow for higher-resolution photos and creating a Windows- and Android-friendly web experience.

Apple has changed how Shared Albums work in a few other crucial ways, which makes sense when you realize that the existing Shared Albums are essentially a 14-year-old “legacy” feature. There’s every indication Apple is rearchitecting and modernizing the whole thing under the hood, both in iOS 27 and the rest of its operating systems, and on the iCloud back end.

It was such a long time ago in iPhone years that you may be surprised to learn that Shared Albums actually pre-date iCloud Photos by two years. This feature launched with the original debut of iCloud in 2012, along with iCloud Photo Stream, back when iPhoto was Apple’s standard way of managing photos on the Mac (and the more advanced Aperture app still existed for pros).

The Legacy of iCloud Shared Albums

Apple’s strategy in those days was to provide a simple way for users to get photos from their iPhone to their Mac and share photos with others — all without worrying about taking up their free 5 GB of iCloud storage (yes, Apple hasn’t ever upgraded its free iCloud storage allotment either).

To accomplish this, iCloud Photo Stream provided a temporary cloud-based repository to store up to 1,000 full-resolution photos for up to 30 days (and only photos — not videos). This was intended to give users enough time to fire up iPhoto or Aperture and suck those photos down onto their Mac’s hard drive.

The other iCloud photo feature, Shared Albums, allowed users to store up to 5,000 photos at lower resolutions of around 3 to 3.5 megapixels. The limit was technically 2,048 pixels on the longest side, which meant that standard 4:3 shots were scaled down to 2048 x 1536. Videos could also be included in Shared Albums, but they were limited to 720p and up to 15 minutes in length.

This was arguably a fair compromise, as Apple didn’t count any of this against users’ iCloud storage allotments — you could create up to 200 Shared Albums of 5,000 photos each without using a single byte of your cloud storage. It was also more than reasonable in an era when the third-generation iPad’s 9.7-inch Retina display only offered the same 2048 x 1536 resolution as an iCloud shared photo, and the newly-launched iPhone 5 boasted an 1136 x 640 screen.

It’s like the old meme about Bill Gates allegedly saying in the 1980s that 640 KB of RAM should be enough for anyone. While Apple surely foresaw a day when Shared Albums might need to grow beyond these limitations, the code for this feature would remain virtually unchanged for the next 14 years — even as Apple introduced more advanced features like a full-featured iCloud Photo Library in 2014 (now known simply as “iCloud Photos”) and iCloud Shared Photo Libraries in 2022.

Shared Albums Finally Grow Up in iOS 27

Thankfully, Apple’s engineers have decided it’s time for this to change. However, they’re not so much upgrading Shared Albums as they are replacing them.

While the iOS 27 version of Shared Albums is remarkably similar to the one we’ve been using for years, there are several indications Apple has built an entirely new system under the hood. That’s not too surprising, considering Apple shuttered iCloud Photo Stream in 2023. It’s probably been looking for ways to do the same with the legacy Shared Albums feature.

Hence, what we’re getting in iOS 27 and the gang is something that’s familiar, but likely also entirely rebuilt from the ground up to be bigger and better than before.

I’ve taken the new feature for a spin in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate, and while we’re still only in the developer beta stages, it’s working well enough to give me a pretty good idea of how much has changed and what we can expect.

Here’s a quick rundown on the improvements in the new Shared Albums:

1. As Apple mentioned, all photos and videos will be stored in their original, full resolutions.
2. Android and Windows users will be able to view and contribute to albums, presumably through an improved web interface (there’s no indication that Apple plans to release actual apps for this, but it’s possible that could be coming later).
3. The Shared Albums will become more like a social feed, thanks to new ways to comment and react to photos.
4. It’s now possible to create Temporary Shared Albums that automatically expire after 30 days.
5. More granular permissions will allow you to decide whether individuals can manage the whole album, only add photos, or only view and comment.

That last one is a big improvement over legacy Shared Albums, where the ability to add photos is currently a global switch — you had to either allow all participants to add photos, or nobody at all.

There’s also been no way before now to delegate full management of the Shared Album.