How to Share a Google Photos Album

Collaborative Memories Without the Hassle

In the era of smartphones, every single person at a family gathering, wedding, or holiday trip is taking their own photographs. The problem arises when the event ends and everyone goes home with their own fragmented piece of the memory. Asking five different people to manually text or email you their photos is tedious, and sending images via messaging apps like WhatsApp severely compresses the file quality, ruining the sharpness of the original photo.

The most elegant solution to this modern problem is to create a shared album in Google Photos. Google Photos is platform-agnostic, meaning it works flawlessly whether your friends use an Android device, an iPhone, or a desktop computer. By creating a shared album, you create a single, central hub where everyone you invite can both view your high-quality photos and upload their own photos from the event.

It completely eliminates the need for endless group chats filled with compressed images, allowing everyone to access the full-resolution memories in one place.

How to Create and Share an Album (Mobile App)

If you have just finished a weekend trip and want to share the photos while riding the train home, the mobile app is the fastest way to do this.

1. Open the Google Photos app on your iPhone or Android device.
2. Look at the bottom navigation bar and tap on Sharing (the icon that looks like two people).
3. At the top of the screen, tap the button labelled Create shared album.
4. You will be prompted to add a title. Type a descriptive name, such as “Summer Camping Trip 2026.”
5. Tap the blue Select photos button.
6. Scroll through your camera roll and tap the circle in the top-left corner of every photo you want to include in the album. (A blue checkmark will appear on selected photos).
7. Once you have selected your photos, tap Add in the top-right corner.
8. The album is now created. To invite people, tap the Share button.

You can now choose how to share the invitation. You can select specific contacts directly within the Google Photos app, or you can tap Share to… to copy a direct link. If you copy the link, you can simply paste it into your existing group chat, allowing anyone with the link to instantly join the album.

How to Create and Share an Album (Desktop)

If you prefer to organise your photos on a larger screen, the desktop web browser offers the exact same functionality.

1. Open your web browser and navigate to photos.google.com.
2. Click on Albums in the left-hand sidebar.
3. Click the Create album button near the top of the screen.
4. Add a title to your new album.
5. Click the Add photos icon (the picture with a plus sign) and select the images you want to include from your library, then click Done.
6. With the album open, click the Share button in the top-right corner.

Just like the mobile app, you can enter the email addresses of your friends or click the Create link button to generate a shareable URL that you can email or message to the group.

Managing Album Permissions

By default, when you share a Google Photos album, the people you invite are allowed to add their own photos to the collection. This is usually exactly what you want for a collaborative event. However, if you are a professional photographer delivering a portfolio, or you simply want to show photos without anyone else cluttering the album, you can restrict their permissions.

1. Open the shared album in the Google Photos app or website.
2. Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner and select Options.
3. Look for the toggle switch labelled Collaborate.
4. Turn this toggle Off.

When Collaboration is turned off, the people you shared the link with can still view and download the photos, but the “Add Photos” button will disappear from their screen. They become viewers rather than contributors.