Please help with Apple Photos App on iMac

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Level 1

13 points

Please help with Apple Photos App on iMac

Please help with our Apple Photos. We recently replaced our family iMac. The old one had user accounts for me and my wife and our three kids. Our photos library was kept on a remote hard that we swapped once or twice a year for safe keeping.

The kids are away at school and my wife and I bought a new machine and decided not to use user accounts. The kids don't use desktops anyhow. I also successfully copied the photo library onto the new machine. Initially it contained all of our "shared albums", but now it does not.

Before when we were invited to a shared album and we accepted on our iPhones, the shared album showed up n all of our devices, including the iMac. Today, if I am invited to a shared album, nothing shows up on the iMac.

About our family: Originally we had one Apple ID. It was from the early days, before kids, before we had iPhones or separate apple identities. It is the ID that has the credit card linked to our account. Later, my wife and I, and eventually the kids, all got unique .iCloud IDs. This may not be what Apple intends with Family Sharing, but it has worked none-the-less. My devices have my unique Apple ID and the original Apple ID with the credit card listed for payments. I don't know if this is having an effect. It would seem that the new desktop, with only the original Apple ID, is now a unique identity.

So I'm wondering if there is a way to get our/my shared albums back? Some way my wife and I can have out unique devices but still use a common desktop? If not, what do I need to change to make the new machine one my personal devices so we can still avoid user groups?

Thank you in advance.

Posted on Dec 21, 2025 7:05 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 21, 2025 7:26 AM in response to jh5684

I'm afraid I'm not much of an authority on Shared Albums, but while you wait for someone who is-- have you read through this?

Create or join shared albums in Photos on Mac - Apple Support

It's not clear to me which machine you're sharing from. Is all the sharing from the Mac? You say "My devices have my unique Apple ID," but you don't say if that includes the Mac. Or does the Mac have its own Apple ID? Do you know the email addresses assigned to each Apple ID you want to share with?

You say, "I also successfully copied the photo library onto the new machine." For the Mac, is the Photos Library in the user's Pictures folder, or is on an external drive? If the drive is external, is it formatted in APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format?

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

200,567 points

Dec 22, 2025 7:36 AM in response to jh5684

Who is the owner of the shared albums? Did you create them or your wife?

The primary storage of the Shared albums is in iCloud. To see them on your Mac, you have to enable the Shared albums in the Settings > Photos, while you are signed into iCloud with the same Apple account that has been used to create the albums or to invite you to view them. If the albums have not been deleted from iCloud, they should come back to the Mac, it may take a while.

One confusing thing about Shared Albums is, that the shared albums are cached locally in addition to the primary storage in iCloud. This way we may be still seeing photos in the shared albums that already have been deleted in iCloud, because the are still in the cache on the device. But the cache will be cleared, when we disable the Shared albums, and when we enable the shared albums again, only the items that are still in iCloud will come back. So we may be seeing less items in the Shared albums, when we switch to a new or different device.

The cache, where the shared albums have been stored locally on your has moved between system versions. On the earlier system versions, up to macOS 10.4 Mojave, the shared albums have been saved in the user Library, not in the Photos Library, even if they have been shown in Photos. So a saved Photos Library will not save the photos from the shared albums. You need a copy of the user Library. I once found the Shared albums in

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.cloudphotosd/Data/Library/Application Support//com.apple.cloudphotosd/services/com.apple.photo.icloud.sharedstreams/assets

I suspect the older system versions have been storing the cached photos in the user library, so they were accessible for iPhoto, Aperture, and Photos.

Since macOS 10.15 Catalina, when Apple removed the support for Aperture and iPhoto, I found the shared albums cached inside the System Photos Library.

When I open the package contents of the System Photos Library, my shared albums are in a cryptically named subfolder of scopes/cloudsharing/data

In my library the full path to a shared album cache is currently

~/Pictures/Fotomediathek_Rowena_2025_03.photoslibrary/scopes/cloudsharing/data/218471100

Which system version has been running on your old Mac?

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Answer 3

jh5684 Author

Level 1

13 points

Dec 23, 2025 11:49 AM in response to léonie

Thank you. The system version running on the old Mac is 12.7.6.

That is interesting about the shared albums being stored locally. Because we were using an external hard drive specifically for our photos library, I wonder if the shared albums were being stored on it. That might explain why when I transferred the photo library from the hear drive to the new computer, the shared albums showed up for a brief time (perhaps as long as the hard drive remained plugged in?).

My wife or I may have created a few of the shared albums, but most of them I believe would have been created by someone else and we were simply invited. I'm thinking they likely would have been shared with both my wife and I at the same time, so there likely would not be any differences when accessing shared albums from here user account or mine. Just thinking out load here.

So moving forward, it sounds like my wife and I are unique thanks to our iPhones and iPads. Any shared album invite in the future to both of us would likely be accepted by us on our phones, but would not be present on the new iMac because it is simply reflecting our older singlular Apple ID. I assume the new computer would need to be "invited" to have access to a shared album.

This sounds like if I want it to work similar to what we are used to, I may want to make the new computer one of my personal devices. This way I can at least accept invites to shared albums on my phone and have them be there on my desktop.

Incidentally, I could not find any any of the files you spoke of. In fact, both of our machines, old and new, don't go down near that far.

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Answer 4

léonie

Level 10

200,567 points

Dec 25, 2025 2:14 AM in response to jh5684

It might be easier, if you would create two separate user accounts on the new Mac for your wife and yourself, using the same Apple IDs (Apple accounts) as on your the mobile devices. Otherwise you will not be able to profit from iCloud Photos and a Shared iCloud Photos Library. I understand, that you wanted to abandon the separate user accounts. But the best feature of iCloud Photos is the syncing of the Photos Libraries between devices, keeping the libraries identical across all devices, so we can use hand-off and work with any device we are having with us and don't have to worry about transferring photos or edits between our devices. And these services are bound to your Apple accounts.

Only one Photos Library at a time can be syncing with iCloud. You caould keep a separate Photos Library on an external drive where you are archiving all your photos and export the photos you not want on the mobile devices to this archive library. A Photos Library that you want to use from two different user accounts needs to be on an external drive. It connate be on your MacIntosh HD, not even in /Users/Shared.

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