Google Photos Shared Album: Create and Share

How Do I Create a Shared Album in Google Photos?

There is no separate "shared album" object in Google Photos. You create an ordinary album and then share it - the album becomes shared the moment you add a person or generate a link, and it stops being shared when you take those away. That is why the app has no "New shared album" button, and why people go looking for one.

1. In the Google Photos app, open Collections and tap New album. On photos.google.com the same button sits under Albums.
2. Give the album a name, then pick the photos you want in it and confirm.
3. Open the finished album and tap Share. Now choose: a link for anyone, or specific people by email.
4. If you want other people to add their own pictures, open the album's options and turn on Collaborate. Only people invited by email can contribute - a link viewer cannot, however you configure it.

The last step is the one that catches people out. Creating the album is free of any account question; collecting photos back into it is not. If half the group is outside Google, an album they can add to is the thing Google Photos will not give you - collecting photos from people without an account covers the platforms that do.

Google Photos gives you four ways to hand that album to somebody, and they are not interchangeable. Here is what each one actually requires:

Notice the last two rows. No Google Photos sharing method puts a password on a link or gives it an end date, and neither does iCloud or Dropbox on a personal plan. A password on a photo link is rarer than people assume, and when it exists it tends to arrive as a business feature. The realistic control is the one Google does offer: turning link sharing off again, which cuts access for everybody at once. Whether shared photo links expire goes through what each platform does when you stop sharing, and how to share photos privately covers the wider set of options.

How to Share a Google Photos Album via Link

This is the fastest way to share a Google Photos album. You generate a link, send it to anyone, and they can view the photos in their browser. No Google account required for basic viewing - though they'll need one to save photos or leave comments.

Step-by-step instructions:

1. Open the Google Photos app on your phone or go to photos.google.com on your computer.
2. Navigate to Collections and open the album you want to share. If you don't have one yet, create one first using the steps above.
3. Tap the Share button (the icon with a person and a plus sign, or three connected dots on desktop).
4. Select "Create link". Google will generate a shareable URL.
5. Copy the link and send it through any channel - text message, email, WhatsApp, Slack. Anyone with the link can view the album.

Important: Anyone who gets that link can see every photo in the album. There's no password, no expiration, and no way to limit access without turning off link sharing entirely. If someone forwards your link to someone else, that person can view the album too.

The desktop and mobile flows differ enough to trip people up - the Share control is a button on the album header on the web and an icon in the app bar on a phone. Album sharing on desktop and mobile walks through both surfaces side by side.

How to Share a Google Album With Someone Specific

If you'd rather not create a public link, you can invite specific people by email. This is more controlled - only the people you invite can see the album, and you can remove one of them later without breaking access for everyone else.

1. Open the album in Google Photos.
2. Tap the Share button.
3. Instead of creating a link, type in the email addresses of the people you want to share with.
4. Choose whether to let them add photos to the album (collaborative mode) or just view.
5. Tap Send. They'll get a notification in Google Photos and an email invitation.

The catch: everyone you invite needs a Google account. If your mother uses an iPhone without Gmail, or your friend never signed up for Google services, they can't see the album this way. You'd need to use the link method instead - which gives up the per-person access control.

Google Photos supports up to 100 collaborators per shared album, with a maximum of 20,000 photos. For most family events and friend groups, that's more than enough. But every one of those 100 people needs a Google account, and an invitation sent to an address that is not a Google account tends to arrive and then do nothing - why a shared album invite does not work lists the usual causes.

Where Are My Shared Albums in Google Photos?

Shared albums are not filed separately from your own, which is why they seem to vanish. Google Photos keeps them in two different places depending on whether you made the album or somebody sent it to you.

• Albums you shared. Open Collections and look at your album list. A shared album shows a small avatar or a person icon on its cover. Nothing else marks it, so an album you shared six months ago sits in the same grid as one you never shared.
• Albums shared with you. Open Collections and tap Sharing (on the web, "Sharing" is in the left sidebar). This is the conversation-style list of everything sent to you and everything you sent, newest first.

A shared album you opened from a link, while signed out, is not saved anywhere. There is no "shared with me" record for a link viewer without an account, so if the message with the URL is deleted, the album is gone as far as that person is concerned. This is the single most common reason someone asks where a shared album went: they were never signed in, so Google had nothing to file it under.

To stop sharing an album:

1. Open the album and tap the three-dot menu, then Options.
2. Turn off Share link to kill the URL for everybody who has it, or remove an individual person from the list to cut off just them.
3. Deleting the album removes it for everyone, including any photos other collaborators added.

How to Share Photos on Google Photos Without Making an Album

You do not have to build an album at all. If you want to send a handful of pictures once, the selection route is quicker and produces a link with the same properties.

1. In your main photo grid, press and hold one photo, then tap the rest you want. On the web, hover a photo and click the circle in its corner.
2. Tap Share.
3. Pick a person, an app, or Create link. Google quietly creates a hidden album to hold that selection and shares that.

Two things follow from that hidden album. The link behaves exactly like an album link - forwardable, no password, no end date. And the selection does show up in your Sharing tab, so an ad-hoc share from two years ago is still live unless you went back and switched it off. Sharing from the phone's system share sheet instead (to WhatsApp, Messages, Mail) sends copies of the files rather than a link, which avoids the lingering URL but usually costs you resolution on the way through the other app.

Partner Sharing and Shared Libraries

The other two sharing routes are continuous rather than per-album. Partner Sharing is Google's arrangement for couples: instead of manually adding photos to shared albums, you set up an ongoing relationship with one other person.

How to set up Partner Sharing:

1. Open Google Photos and go to Settings.
2. Tap Partner Sharing and select your partner's Google account.
3. Choose what to share: all photos, photos of specific people (using face recognition), or photos from a specific date onward.
4. Your partner accepts the invitation, and photos start appearing in their library automatically.

Shared Libraries is the group version, designed for families. It pools photos from up to 5 Google accounts into a single shared space, and everyone in it can see and contribute. Everybody involved needs a Google account and needs to be in the same Google Family group. Unlike a shared album, it is not organized around a single event - it is a continuous, always-on pool, so the free tier's 15 GB shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos fills up much faster with five people feeding it.

Both features lean on Google's photo analysis. The face-recognition filtering in Partner Sharing means Google's AI is actively identifying faces in your library and deciding which photos to pass on. If that bothers you, the Google Photos privacy settings guide covers what you can and can't turn off, and our Google Photos vs iCloud comparison covers the sharing differences in more depth.

What Google Photos Sharing Can't Do

Google Photos sharing has genuine gaps, and they are not edge cases - they show up in ordinary family sharing.

• No password protection. You can't add a password to a shared album link. Anyone who gets the link can see everything. If you share a wedding album link in a group chat and someone forwards it, there's nothing stopping strangers from browsing your photos.
• No link expiration. Shared links stay active until you manually turn them off. There's no "expires after 7 days" option.
• Viewers need Google accounts for full features. Without a Google account, link viewers can see photos but can't save them, comment, or add their own. For viewing-only purposes, this might be fine. For collaborative albums, it's a dealbreaker.
• Storage saver compresses photos. If you're not paying for Google One, the default "Storage saver" mode compresses photos to 16 MP and videos to 1080p. You're not sharing originals unless you've switched to "Original quality" (which counts against your 15 GB limit).
• AI processing is not optional. Google's AI analyzes every photo you upload - faces, objects, locations, text in images. There's no way to upload photos to Google Photos without this analysis happening.
• Cross-platform friction. While Google Photos works on iPhone, the experience is second-class. Notifications are unreliable, and features like Partner Sharing don't integrate with the native iOS Photos app.

Sharing with someone who has no Google account

Use the link method, not the invite method. "Create link" is the only one of Google Photos' four sharing routes that a person without a Google account can open at all - the other three check for an account before anything appears. Send the link and they will see the album in their browser.

What they will not get is the rest of it. Without signing in they cannot save a photo to their own library, cannot leave a comment, and cannot add their own pictures to the album - so a link is fine for showing a grandparent the christening photos and useless for pooling everyone's shots from the same christening. Google will also keep prompting them to sign in, which is exactly the friction you were trying to avoid. If more than one person in the group is outside Google, the account requirement stops being a detail and starts deciding the tool; sharing photos without making anyone sign up compares the platforms that treat that as the normal case.

When You Need Something Beyond Google Photos

Google Photos sharing works well within its constraints: everyone has Google accounts, you don't need password protection, and you're comfortable with AI processing your photos. When those assumptions don't hold, here is how the usual alternatives compare.

Mixed groups (iPhone and Android): iCloud Shared Albums are the obvious answer if everyone is on Apple hardware, and Apple has been widening where they can be opened - iCloud Shared Albums going cross-platform covers what changes for Android users. Recipients still need an Apple ID, though, so it moves the account requirement rather than removing it. Viallo is a private photo sharing platform where the recipient of a link needs no account and no app - they open the gallery in a browser, with a lightbox, automatic location grouping and a map view.

Privacy-first sharing: If you want photo sharing without AI analysis, Google Photos alternatives for privacy covers the options in detail. The short version: Viallo does not scan or analyze your photos, does not train on them, and keeps them at full resolution without recompression.

Large file transfers: If you need to send hundreds of full-resolution photos as downloadable files, Dropbox or WeTransfer are better suited. They treat photos as files rather than a gallery, but they're built for bulk downloads.

The core question is whether your recipients have Google accounts. If they do, Google Photos sharing is solid, and the album-plus-invite route is the one to use. If even one person does not - and you don't want to ask them to create one - you need a link-based platform that works without authentication, and you should pick it before you build the album rather than after.

Frequently Asked Questions

Google Photos sharing is good at the thing it was built for, which is moving photos between people who are already inside Google. The two gaps that actually bite - a link you cannot expire, and a viewer who gets a second-class album unless they sign in - only show up once someone outside that circle is on the receiving end. If that describes your family, give Viallo a try: nobody you send a link to has to sign up for anything.