How to Set Up a Shared Google Photos Album for Your Family

Google Photos is a free app from Google that stores your photos in the cloud and makes them available on any device where you are signed in to your Google account. One of its most popular features for families is shared albums — a single photo album that multiple family members can view and add to.

A shared album is different from just emailing photos to each other. Instead of everyone having separate copies scattered across inboxes and phone storage, there is one central album where all the family photos live together. Anyone with access can add new photos, and everyone can see contributions from the whole family.

This works great for events like birthdays, holidays, and vacations — everyone who attends takes photos on their own phone, and then adds the best ones to the shared album. Instead of only seeing the photos you personally took, you end up with a much richer collection from multiple perspectives.

You can also set up a "Partner Sharing" arrangement where Google Photos automatically shares every new photo you take with one other person — like a spouse or partner. This way, neither of you has to remember to manually add photos; they share automatically.

Shared albums work across iPhone and Android. The person receiving your invitation to join an album needs a Google account (Gmail), but it does not matter what kind of phone they use.

Google gives everyone 15 gigabytes of free storage. Google Photos compresses photos slightly by default to save space, but for sharing family snapshots, the quality is excellent. If you want to store original full-resolution files, you will eventually need a Google One paid storage plan.