iOS 27 Changes Shared Albums in a Way That Could Eat Your iCloud Storage

Summary

A change buried inside iOS 27 is about to catch a lot of people off guard. For over a decade, Apple’s Shared Albums in Photos have worked as a free space: you could add up to 5,000 photos and videos to a shared album, none of it counting against your iCloud storage, though photos were downsampled to 2,048 pixels. In iOS 27, Apple is upgrading Shared Albums to full resolution, which sounds like a win. The catch: shared content will now count against the album owner’s iCloud storage. That includes anything uploaded by other people you share the album with. So if you share an album with family or friends and they drop 400 full-resolution beach photos into it, that storage comes out of your iCloud plan, not theirs. Apple is also opening Shared Albums to non-Apple users via iCloud.com, meaning anyone with a link can contribute photos online, regardless of device. Existing Shared Albums are not affected by this change unless you manually tap the new “Upgrade Shared Album” button.

Why it matters

This is the kind of change that will surprise many families who have relied on Shared Albums as a free photo-sharing infrastructure. Before you upgrade any existing albums in September, check your current iCloud storage headroom and consider who has access to your albums. If you share widely, others’ full-resolution uploads could push you into a paid tier you were not planning for. The practical move is to audit who is in your shared albums and whether they are heavy photo sharers before iOS 27 lands this fall.

HTD Says

iOS 27 is upgrading Shared Albums to full resolution, which sounds great, but the gotcha is that everyone’s uploads now count against your iCloud storage, not theirs, so if you share albums with family members who love to upload, you will want to check your storage limits before you tap that upgrade button. You have been warned, but whether you are listening or not will come out later when you get the “storage full, do you want to upgrade” notification.

Shared Albums were always a mystery to me. My family has a bunch of different shared albums from trips or holidays or other important events. And since I have 20-something-year-old girls, a single photoshoot typically consists of one pose with about 30 images. Then they are all shared so that the subject of the photos can review them and pick the best ones.

If you upgrade the Shared Albums to the new high-resolution ones, your iCloud storage could quickly evaporate. Be sure that those of you who use Shared Albums know this in advance!

Source:

MacRumors