Why are Shared Albums still limited to low-quality photos?

daan99 wrote: Why are Shared Albums still limited to low-quality photos?

I think the answer to "WHY," as léonie said, is that they are free-- they don't take up any of your iCloud storage.

I'm using iCloud Links to share pictures in full resolution with family and friends:

Share photos and videos with an iCloud Link on iCloud.com - Apple Support

The links automatically expire after 30 days, so you don't have to worry about leaving them out there forever. They are viewable and downloadable with a browser, even for people without iCloud accounts. However, they don't have full metadata-- no captions, keywords, or titles.

I haven't tried exporting pictures and using a link to iCloud Drive-- that's a great idea for collaborators, but I might not want to use it to show friends my pictures…

It this way since the shared albums have been introduces as one of the first iCloud features with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in 2012. Shared albums are meant to be used to show each other the photos easily, without having to sign up for paid cloud storage, in an optimized size and quality, so they will not need much storage on the devices of the subscribers. Depending the system version some metadata will also be stripped for privacy reasons. Because it is a free service, there are additional limits: iCloud: My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Sharing limits

To share photos in full quality and with all metadata you may want to use the Shared iCloud Photos Library or a link to a shared folder on iCloud Drive on iCloud.com -use the paid iCloud services, not the free service.

When I am wanting to share a photo book, I create it with pages and share the link to the book on iCloud Drive.

Shared albums are living fossiles, like the coelacanth and should become extinct by now - they were great, when we had nothing else to share photos and send messages and likes with them. Now we are using the Messages.app on our iPhones or Air Drop to show each other occasionally a photo and comment on it. The Shared albums have been the predecessor to the messages with photos. We don't need them anymore for this purpose.

Originally the shared albums have been called Shared Photo Stream, then iCloud Photo Sharing, then Shared albums, but they essentially remained the Shared Streams, where we could occasionally drop a few new photos, the subscribers would comment on them, like them, reply by adding a few photos of their own, etc.

Apple has not changed the Shared albums much over the years, only the name. A recent improvement is, that the capture date is no longer stripped and we can sort the items in the shared albums by the capture date. For many years the shared albums have been sorted by the date added, so we could find the most recently added items quickly. But they are still not ver useful for sharing web galleries with photos, because the tiles and captions and location data are stripped, and we have to add these data back as comments.

I would also point out that if the question begins with 'why...?' then only Apple can really answer it. While experienced folks here can make very educated guesses as to what's going on, these are only guesses.

I think if you rephrased that post a little it would be an excellent feature request that you can post here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

Yer_Man wrote: …I think if you rephrased that post a little it would be an excellent feature request

I think that, as léonie was saying, "Shared Albums" are not going to be improved and, if anything, maybe they'll be replaced by something more useful. I sure wish iCloud Links included Titles, Captions, and Keywords. I guess I will go to that Feedback link…