Sharing photos on your iPhone or iPad is going to be a lot easier with the new features introduced in the latest version of Apple’s iOS operating system, but there are a few potential flaws.
New to iOS 16, this year’s WWDC launches a shared photo library designed to help you share your photos easily, even automatically, with a select group of five other people, usually family or close friends. With
Apple’s new iOS 16 release brings a lot of new features, but you don’t want to enable them.
The new iCloud Shared Photo Library lets your group members keep their shared memories in one place and is specially designed with a variety of new helpful features to encourage this type of sharing. It’s like a more powerful version of Google Photos’s “Partner Sharing” feature that has been expanded to work with multiple people instead of just one.
The Shared Photo Library lets you decide what you want to share and what you want to keep secret, allowing you to make a real selection of your photos based on criteria such as the start date or the presence of people in the photo.
After this initial setup you can manually add additional photos, or take advantage of Apple’s new automatic settings that share content for you, which means you are less dependent on remembering to upload their photos after an event.
One such setting is a new toggle switch built into the Camera app that, when activated, sends every photo you take directly to a shared library so that everyone in the group can see it instantly. Another setting uses Bluetooth to turn on automatic sharing mode for you when it detects that your group members are nearby.
Once added, the contents of the shared library will be displayed in the memory, in featured photos, and in the photo widget for all group members. Each member of the group has the same level of access and is able to add, edit or delete images from the library.
But be careful!
I can see how these options will encourage and facilitate the sharing of important images that will become a valuable collection over time. However, I also see the possibility of some embarrassing situations where inappropriate photos will find their way into the inadvertently shared library.
Apple notes that you can temporarily turn off the automatic sharing option for a personal photo, but what if you forget? Because of the potential for accidental oversharing, some people may first think twice about enabling this option. Or maybe I’m just paranoid. The same goes for people who like to take dozens of selfies before choosing the best one. No one wants to see these.
Similarly, if everyone is able to edit, caption, or delete pictures from a shared library, I see the possibility of conflict over who has the final say on what will be in the album. For example, being able to delete a terrifying group photo that has you sneezing in the middle might seem like a great idea to you, but not so great for the person who originally shared the photo because the moment was important to them.
Additionally, in Apple’s presentation, photos are being moved to a shared library instead of being copied. I hope that deleted photos from shared libraries won’t be permanently lost from users’ personal libraries either, but for now, it’s not clear.
I’m sure Apple has considered these situations, but it remains to be seen how these situations will pan out when iOS 16 is released later this year.
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