Hands On: iCloud Shared Photo Library and Family Checklist

iCloud Shared Photo Library

Over the years, I’ve shared family photos with my wife Jennifer in three ways: iMessage, AirDrop, and Shared Albums. However, of those, iMessage won hands down, not because it’s the best way to share photos, but because Messages is an app we already use every day to communicate. Plus, sharing photos with Messages is easy whether you’re already in the app and using the Photos iMessage app or in the Photos app itself and using the share sheet. From conversations with friends and family, I know I’m not alone in my scattershot approach to sharing photos with my family.

It’s into that chaotic, ad hoc mess and all of its variations that users have improvised over the years that Apple is stepping in with iCloud Shared Photo Library, its marquee new Photos feature for iOS and iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura. And you know what? It just works.

The feature lets anyone with an iCloud photo library share part or all of their photo library with up to five other people. Once activated, a new library is created that sits alongside your existing one and counts against the iCloud storage of the person who created it.

One critical limitation of iCloud Shared Photo Library is that you can only be a member of one shared library, a restriction that is designed to limit the library to your immediate household. That means I could share photos with my wife and kids because there are fewer than six of us, but I couldn’t set up another library with my siblings or parents for our extended families. Nor could I invite one of my extended family members to use the extra slot I’ve got in my family library unless they were willing to forego being part of any shared library their own family created.

Unwinding a shared library.

Unwinding a shared library.

So, what do you do if you’re in a shared library and want to join a different one? There’s a button in the Photos section of Settings to leave a library, so you can do so with one tap, saving all of the photos in the shared library to your personal library or keeping just those you originally contributed to the shared pool. Deleting libraries is possible too, but only by the person who created them, who is given the choice of keeping all images or just the ones they contributed when they do so.

Read more

Last Week, on Club MacStories: PC Gaming on the Studio Display, Focus Modes, a Read-Later App, and a Town Hall Event Preview

Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings along with a look at what’s coming up next:

Monthly Log: August 2022

Alex's desk setup.

Alex’s desk setup.

MacStories Weekly: Issue 334

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Up Next

Tomorrow, September 7th, at 4:30 pm Eastern US time, Federico, Alex, and I will host a live Town Hall audio event in the Club MacStories+ Discord community, recapping Apple’s Far Out event and sharing our initial thoughts about everything that’s announced. For Club members who can’t join us live, we’ll publish the event audio in the Town Hall podcast feed.

Kolide: Endpoint Security Shouldn’t Mean Compromising Employee Privacy [Sponsor]

If you build a dystopian and cynical security program born out of fear, mistrust, and suspicion, then you will inevitably make your fellow employees your enemies.

That’s a quote from Honest Security, Kolide’s mission statement, and North Star. It was written by their CEO, Jason Meller, who spent his career in cybersecurity before founding Kolide. 

He was troubled by the widely-accepted idea among cybersecurity professionals that end users should be treated, first and foremost, as threats. This way of thinking informs the traditional approach to device management, which relies on MDMs that take control of devices and come with surveillance capabilities that most companies don’t need or even really want.

Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.

Kolide’s open-source agent collects data across 43 categories on Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. It can answer questions like:

  • Do any of my developers have unsecured SSH keys floating around?
  • Does everyone have disk encryption, screen lock, and password managers set up?
  • Are there any Macs in my fleet in need of a new battery?

And while Kolide can provide insights that MDMs can’t, it’s Kolide’s commitment to transparency really sets them apart. Employees can visit the User Privacy Center for an explanation of precisely what data is being collected, by whom, and for what purpose.

Want to see how it works for yourself? Click here for a free trial, no credit card required, and let us show you what we’re all about.

Our thanks to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.

AppStories, Episode 293 – Let’s Fix the Music App

This week on AppStories, we roll up our sleeves to talk about the Music app and how it could be improved.

Sponsored by:

  • Trade – Save Big, Support Small Roasters. Get $30 off your first order.
  • Pillow – Sleeping better, made simple.
  • Sourcegraph – Universal Code Search. Move fast, even in big codebases. Try it now.
[Subscribe here.](https://appstories.net/plans)

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, I’ve been playing with a special adapter to connect Nintendo Joy-Con to the iPad mini.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

Captionista: Simple, Flexible Video Subtitling for the iPhone and iPad

One of the tradeoffs I see a lot in the apps we cover is between simplicity and flexibility. Simplicity has its virtues, but often apps designed to make things as easy as possible for users end up being inflexible, resulting in cookie-cutter output. The flip side is that maximum flexibility can get out of hand fast, leading to a steep learning curve. Striking the right balance is hard, but the apps that do are always among my favorites because they work so well for a wide audience. That’s exactly how I feel about Captionista, an iPhone and iPad app for adding text to video. It’s simple to understand but includes the kind of depth that epitomizes what it means to do one thing well.

I don’t work with video a lot, and when I do, my needs are pretty simple. Often, I want to demonstrate something with a screen recording, which isn’t always easy to follow without some sort of explanation. That’s where Captionista comes in.

Read more

Relay FM Kicks Off Its Fourth Annual Fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Today, Relay FM, which was founded by our close friends Stephen Hackett and Myke Hurley, kicked off its annual fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to help combat childhood cancer. We’d love it if MacStories readers joined us in supporting this cause.

You can make a donation by visiting here.

If you’re a MacStories reader, there’s a good chance you have listened to one of the shows Federico co-hosts on the network or have another favorite, in which case you may have already contributed. However, if not, please consider donating.

St. Jude plays an important role in the fight against childhood cancer, treating kids, and doing research with other medical facilities around the world. Your donations help ensure that families aren’t charged for treatment, travel, housing, or meals, so their sole focus is helping their child get better.

Relay FM will be raising money for St. Jude through the end of September, with the highlight of the drive being Podcastathon, a multi-hour extravaganza featuring special guests from your favorite Relay FM shows that will be held September 16th and will be streamed on Relay FM’s Twitch channel.

This year, Relay FM has added the ability for others to start their own fundraising campaigns to help it achieve its goal. Anyone who participates and raises $1 or more will earn a special Relay FM challenge coin. Raise $250 or more, and you’ll receive a deskmat decorated with a sea of Myke and Stephen cartoon heads.

Thanks in advance for checking out Relay FM’s fundraiser for St. Jude and to all who donate.

Last Week, on Club MacStories: Watch Face Automation, Club-Only Wallpapers, a Giveaway, and an Anniversary Town Hall

Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings along with a look at what’s coming up next:

First Anniversary of Club MacStories+ Town Hall

Last week we marked the first anniversary of the expansion of Club MacStories with a special audio event in the Club MacStories+ Discord community. Federico, Alex and I were joined by Relay FM co-founders Stephen Hackett and Myke Hurley to look back at the Club’s past year, hear what Relay FM is doing to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital this year, and share the technology that has had the biggest impact on our lives in the past year.

MacStories Weekly: Issue 333

In issue 333 of MacStories Weekly:

Kosmik: For All Mindkind [Sponsor]

Kosmik is a dashboard for your creativity. Built for designers, researchers, and writers, Kosmik’s infinite canvas for the iPad and Mac lets you bring together notes, your writing, images, websites, PDFs, and more on a single canvas called a Universe, so you can stop switching between apps and focus on what you’re creating.

Everything in a Kosmik Universe is a card, and cards from one canvas can be incorporated into another, making the first canvas app with the sort of transclusion found in note-taking apps like Roam Research and Obsidian. It’s a powerful yet simple architecture that reduces friction, so you can focus on your work.

The flexibility of Kosmik’s canvas means you can take notes, browse the web, collect PDFs, images and other resources, and write all in one place. That encourages spatial thinking, making new connections and links between materials, and reduces distractions all at once in a single easy-to-use interface.

Kosmik is a completely native, peer-to-peer solution that respects your privacy. The app syncs your data between devices with no central server. Everything is encrypted end-to-end too.

You can publish your Kosmik canvases and cards to the web for sharing with colleagues, and even more collaboration features are coming later this year. Kosmik is available on the web now, too, making it accessible in more places and to more users than ever before.

If you’re looking for a new way to organize your thoughts, writing, and, really, anything else, sign up for Kosmik today. MacStories readers can enjoy a free year of access just by following this link. From ideation to production, Kosmik lets you think better and more freely to uncover insights and have some fun too!

Kosmik is available to download on the App Store and also offers great resources for new users like its Substack newsletter and Discord community.

Our thanks to Kosmik for sponsoring MacStories this week.