Shared Albums have long been a perk of Apple's Photos system. For over a decade, Apple has let you add up to 5,000 photos and videos per album, with none of it counting against your iCloud storage. That's set to change in iOS 27 coming this September.
New Shared Albums now retain full resolution, rather than being downsampled to 2,048 pixels on the long edge. It's a nice improvement, but now they take up your iCloud storage space – as well as anything dropped into the album by anyone you collaboratively share it with.
In other words, if you share an unrestricted Shared Album link to your brother and they upload 400 beach shots to it, you will be paying for them in your own iCloud storage. Not only that, the photos won't be downsampled, so they'll take up even more space.
Apple has also opened Shared Albums up to the web, so people without an Apple Account or an Apple device can join one via your link and contribute their pics and video via iCloud.com. So be careful who you share with...
On the plus side, your existing Shared Albums are unaffected by the change – unless you tap the new "Upgrade Shared Album" button – but take a moment to think about your storage limits before you do.
iOS 27 is currently in public beta, which you can try out now.
