Unable to Move Items to Shared Library / can't revert photos to Personal Library

I think there are bugs in the new Shared Library aspects of Photos on iOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS. I have two issues.


  1. I set up a Shared Library and moved 1000s of photos inside. I have not yet shared it with anyone yet. Of course there is some clean up to do, but I cannot move photos out of the Shared Library back to my Personal Library - there is no option to do so.
  2. There is an option to add photos from my Personal Library to my Shared Library, but when I try, I get the message "Unable to Move Items to Shared Library - try again later". I have tried may different ways to move photos to the Shared Library after the initial setup and it doesn't work. It worked before my three devices were set up with Shared Library, but now that everything is in sync, it does not.


Two frustrating behaviors. Am I alone in this?

Posted on Oct 26, 2022 01:58 AM

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Posted on Oct 26, 2022 02:06 AM

Well, I already found a fix for #2.


On the Mac I noticed that my Apple ID was the Settings>Shared Library tab was set to "Invited" (somehow?!). I selected remove from the ... and poof, I became owner. Now I can add photos back into the Shared Library, at least.


I still can't get my photos out of the Shared Library, yet.


But I hope the above can be useful for someone.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 26, 2022 02:06 AM in response to sig eigei

Well, I already found a fix for #2.


On the Mac I noticed that my Apple ID was the Settings>Shared Library tab was set to "Invited" (somehow?!). I selected remove from the ... and poof, I became owner. Now I can add photos back into the Shared Library, at least.


I still can't get my photos out of the Shared Library, yet.


But I hope the above can be useful for someone.

Oct 26, 2022 05:47 AM in response to sig eigei

And now I solved #1. Did a repair of my Photos library on the Mac, holding CMD-OPT when opening the app, and it worked. The app re-syncs the Shared Library with iCloud (it took several hours) but this seemed to reset the status of all the photos so the option to send them from Personal to Shared or vice versa was finally available to all photos again.


Hope this helps someone.

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Unable to Move Items to Shared Library / can't revert photos to Personal Library

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