My impression is that sharing photos from Google Photos is a lot easier than sharing from a Mac/iOS Photos album that is backed up in iCloud. Am I missing any benefits of sharing an album from iCloud Photos?
For Google Photos you just copy a link and share it and you’re done. With Apple Photos you have to go through various steps, a non-shared album needs to be recreated as a shared album, and links don’t show up as well with nice previews as do Google Photos.
It would be nice to just use Apple Photos since I have a large iCloud plan and a less-large Google Photos plan. But do people generally do that? I don’t see many shared Apple Photos around. Am I missing some points here?
I’m going to answer my own question because I just got off the phone with Apple Support. There are apparently two ways of sharing an album, neither suitable:
I can share the album and choose copy a link to share. With Apple Support doing screen sharing, I opened the link in a private browser window to test it and (1) it doesn’t retain the key frame and (2) the show-stopper is that the link expires in a month! I want to post my link to my blog, FaceBook, etc., and let anybody with the link see the album, but I don’t want the link to expire!
I can share the album and choose to create a new shared album with the album contents. But in this case you need to specify with whom you are sharing the album and enter their email addresses and invite them. But as mentioned above, I want a sharing link. This option doesn’t provide that.
So the solution it seems would be to copy the photos to a Google Photos album and just grab a link to that album and share it that way.
And one quick followup. It literally took just 1 minute to create a new Google Photos album on my Mac and open up Apple Photos and drag the contents of the album I want to share into the Google Photos album.
No convoluted muss or fuss.
It would be nice if Apple Photos was as simple as that. I hope I am missing something. Thanks.
And one more note: The method I described above works great for the still photos in the album you want copied to Google Photos. But dragging videos directly from the Apple Photos app to the Google Photos album on the Mac doesn’t copy them.
The solution is to download those movies to a folder in your Finder first, and then drag-and-drop them into Google Photos. That works, and puts them in the correct place in the album timeline.