Photos disappearing from shared album

I'm having the frustrating problem of adding photos to a shared album, only to have them disappear a few minutes later. The steps I'm following are:


Create a shared album

Either drag and drop photos into shared album, or click "Add Photos" and select ones to put into the shared album

The progress wheel shows up in the top bar, and the photos initially show in the shared album.

After a few minutes, photos start to disappear from the shared album a few at a time. I can watch the photos get reorganized as they drop off, and can also see the total count of photos drop.

Sometimes there will be some left over, but I would say usually all of the photos I added go away.

I'm left with an empty shared album


Anyone else have this problem or work out a solution? Some other possibly pertinent info: I'm working on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) running macOS Monterey v12.6.7, and the photos library is on an external hard drive, iCloud Photos is turned off, Shared Albums is on.


Thanks in advance

Posted on Jul 12, 2023 08:02 PM

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Posted on Jan 24, 2024 11:51 PM

This is exactly my issue too. My son found my father's old Sony Cybershot and started to take photos.

These photos are now in my Apple Photos app but not wanting to be shared...

Any insight from Apple on this?

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9 replies

Jul 14, 2023 04:29 AM in response to beckermjohn

That is a big problem. After the upgrade to Ventura you may not even be able to open the library at all on drive with FAT32 format.

I strongly recommend to move your Photos Library to a correctly formatted external drive (or create a separate partition on the same drive formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled) or APFS) and move the Photos Library there. You cannot change the file system format without erasing the drive and losing the data there, so you have to save them temporarily somewhere else to be able to change the file system format.


Dec 6, 2023 01:32 AM in response to beckermjohn

I have the same problem. I am selecting a number of photos from a folder, and drag them into a shared folder. They appear in the shared folder and after a while - 10-30 seconds - some of them disappear. After finding out which have disappeared, I drag them again to the shared folder and then it seems fine for a while. However, after repeating this process a few times, some of the early uploaded photos are disappearing again.

It is frustrating, because I can't build up my shared album like this and I am under time pressure to share it with others.

Any suggestions are welcome. I am using a MacBook M1 Pro, running Sonoma 14.1.2.

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Photos disappearing from shared album

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