iCloud iCloud Photo Library Vs Local Albums

[Daniel97]

I have 30,000+ photos in my photo libraries on my iPhone/Mac (they share the same library) and most of those photos I have been manually sharing with my family over WhatsApp etc.

I have most of these photos sorted into albums on my iCloud devices and not shared iCloud libraries with others.

Can I delete all of my 'albums' that are just local to me and instead create iCloud shared albums with people so all of my photos are shared rather than local?

Or will I run into problems?

I obviously dont want the same albums locally and shared to be duplicated.

As far as im aware, as long as I dont delete the images from my libraries, I can do what I like with the albums?

 

[RhetTbull]

Delete regular (non-shared) albums does not delete the photos contained in the album. So yes, you could do what you're asking, with a caveat. Photos in shared albums are lower-resolution jpeg images -- the original image does not get shared. So you'll effectively have duplicates of any photo you share in a shared album. However, you won't see them in the regular library view as they only show up in the shared albums. There is a iCloud Shared library feature that lets you share a library with other users and this does share the originals. See instructions here: How to use iCloud Shared Photo Library - Apple Support I think you can only share the Shared library with 5 people so this is really focused more on families than friend groups.