Will deleting photos from iPhone library also remove them from shared albums?

The photos in the Shared albums are copies. Shared albums are not referencing the photos in the library, because the photos in the Shared albums are optimized for sharing. The Photos.app is downsizing the shared photos to 2048 pixel on the longest edge and stripping some metadata, depending on the system version. The originals in the library need to be preserved, if we do not want to lose quality and metadata, like the locations or the date and titles. Shared albums are just caches in the cloud for sharing, not albums at all. The name is misleading.

SilverMonkey51 wrote:

After reading many questions as to permanent saving of photos, it seems as though I would have to save to an undesirable shared album after deleting photos from library. Is this correct or will shared also be deleted?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Permanent saving iphone photos

Yes, you're not physically moving the photos to the album, it points back to the photo in the library.

I haven't used "Shared Albums" in a while, but I think that those pictures are actually separate from the pictures that are in the Library. I just tried it-- I deleted a picture from my Library, but the corresponding picture remained in a Shared Album I had made a couple of years ago. Luckily, I have 29 days to put that picture back.

I also tried it the other way, and when I deleted a picture from a Shared Album, the Library version remained.

I admit that I'm not sure what "I would have to save to an undesirable shared album after deleting photos from library" means. For instance, "save" is not a function in Photos.

I'm also not sure how this translates to Windows…

léonie wrote: … The photos in the Shared albums are copies. Shared albums are not referencing the photos in the library,

Thanks-- that's what I thought, but I don't deal with Shared Albums enough to know for sure. And I wanted to add a caution, just in case.

The test you made, is already convincing, Richard. We can also see that Shared Albums are different from albums by editing a photo after we have we have shared it. The version in the Shared album will not be updated like in a standard album. And we can add the same photo over and over again and have multiple versions of the same photo in the shared album. This is not possible in a standard album. To have a photo twice in a standard album we have to duplicate it.

oops