Photos for Mac and iOS: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Sharing and Exporting

Let’s face it: Prints are expensive and the postal service is slow. To get your pictures and videos in front of others faster (or instantly), you’ve got to use other methods. Fortunately, Photos includes several ways to share your goodies online. For example, you can easily send them via email or text message, and post them on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.

However, one of the coolest tricks in the sharing realm is to create shared albums and then invite people to subscribe to them (don’t worry, it’s free). Doing so lets you share pictures and videos with certain people in a private fashion; only the people you invite to the album can see them. The opportunities for sharing your photographic life in this way, and for you to share in the photographic lives of others, are vast. For example, in the vacation scenario, your adoring subscribers can instantly see, and comment upon, the picture of the macadamia-nut–encrusted coconut-pineapple pancakes you had for breakfast this morning in Maui. For important life events—graduations, weddings, births, black-belt tests—you can set up a shared album so family and friends can see pictures of the event as you add them. And if you grant them permission, they can upload their own images to the shared album. Shared albums aren’t just for Photos-using folks, either: If the person you want to share pictures with doesn’t have a Mac, Photos is happy to generate a public web gallery so that ...