Why are my photos showing up on other family member's devices?

Question

Level 1

23 points

Why are my photos showing up on other family member's devices?

I was looking through the photos app on my son's iPad, and I see that all of my photos - which are NOT in a shared folder - are showing up on his (and my other son's, and my wife's) device. I thought that only SHARED FOLDERS could be viewed by all family members on my shared plan. However, none of their photos show up in my Photos app.

Note: to fill this out, I'm required to select a device and topic, but this issue is not device-specific. It's related to my family's shared plan and is happening on the Photos app on all of devices, OSX and iOS.

Posted on Mar 22, 2025 12:47 AM

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Answer 1

markwmsn

Level 6

16,055 points

Mar 22, 2025 9:15 PM in response to madeinspain

Just to check, can you verify the following?

Your family is using a Family Sharing plan.

Each family member has a separate Apple Account (Apple ID) and uses it to log into their own devices (or their separate Mac account if a Mac is shared).

You are not using a Shared Library (in addition to not using Shared Albums).

Is that correct? If not, what is different?

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Answer 2

madeinspain Author

Level 1

23 points

Mar 23, 2025 10:31 AM in response to markwmsn

Hello and thank you for your reply. Yes, you are correct. We have an Apple Family Plan and we share an APPLE ONE PREMIERE SUBSCRIPTION, which includes iCloud+ storage (as well as music, Apple TV, etc.). Each member has their own, individual Apple ID. For Apple photos, we do have a few shared albums, but we do NOT have a shared library - we don't even have that feature enabled or configured. Yet, my photo library is showing up on their devices. Does this mean that all of these multiple copies of my photo library are getting backed up to iCloud, and therefore, taking up extra storage space?

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Answer 3

markwmsn

Level 6

16,055 points

Mar 24, 2025 8:48 PM in response to madeinspain

If, in fact, your photo library has gotten duplicated to those other devices, then it would be taking up extra storage space.

However, we haven't figured out how/why your library would be duplicated across devices, having eliminated a common Apple ID across devices and a Shared Library.

Is this an ongoing situation? If you take a new photo on your iPhone/iPad (or add it to Photos on a Mac if that's what you use), does it show up on those other devices? If it does, then I think you need to recheck that all of your devices are actually using the appropriate Apple ID for their respective users.

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Why are my photos showing up on other family member's devices?