My wife and I had used the Apple Photos Shared Library since its introduction in October 2022. After almost a year, we decided to turn it off—but Apple’s process for separating shared libraries between two people seemed anything but straightforward. Here’s how I managed to separate our libraries while keeping the photos we took intact.

Step One: Moving My Photos to My Personal Library

The first step was to move all photos I had contributed to the shared library back into my personal library. Here’s how I did it.

I opened a photo I had shared in Apple Photos on macOS, clicked the ( i ) button to view details, and selected Shared by You. Then, I selected all photos listed under Shared by You by clicking the first one, holding Shift, and selecting the last one to highlight everything. I right-clicked the selection and chose Move X items to Personal Library. 

Step Two: Handling Burst Photos and Syncing Issues

Syncing took over a day to complete fully. Numbers on every device were wonky and it went very slow.

Moving burst photos didn’t work as smoothly. I filtered the photos by typing “Burst” in the search bar, selected all burst photos, and hid them (in the hidden folder) temporarily—I could unhide later. Some photos that my wife had marked as favorites still showed up as favorited in my personal library though, so I had to go through and manually un-favorited these.

Gradually, I noticed the numbers going down in the shared library (sometimes it went up, but eventually went down), reflecting that my photos were syncing to my personal library on both macOS and iOS (iOS was much slower). This took a while, especially on our phones. Over a day! But eventually I stopped noticing any of my photos in our shared library, so all that was left was my wife’s.

Step Three: Leaving the Shared Library on My Wife’s iPhone

Once my photos were out of the shared library, I went to my wife’s iPhone and had her leave the shared library, opting to keep only the photos she had contributed. On my computer and phone I started to notice the shared library item count go down.

Step Four: Deleting the Shared Library

I let this go on overnight, eventually the shared library on my computer was empty, my photos seemed to have gone to my personal library (I didn’t have any of hers) and my wife’s had gone to hers (and she didn’t have any of mine). On our phones, it was a different story. I could tell photos in the shared library were going down, but it was slow. My wife’s personal library seemed to have finished, numbers on her phone were not going up or down and she no longer had a shared library option. 

Seeing the shared library empty on both my and my wife’s computers, and seeing her library intact, I decided to delete the shared library on my phone. I chose to keep any photos I’d contributed, which resulted in about 200 lingering photos that were likely due to syncing issues, I am not sure.

Within 30 minutes I no longer saw a shared library option on my phone or on my computer. My computer still has about 18k count while my phone has about 64k, but I am sure it will eventually sync up because it still says “Deleting Shared Library” near the sync area.

Conclusion

It appears that when you leave a library, you have the option to retain everything or only what you personally contributed. Similarly, when you delete a shared library, you can choose to keep only what you contributed. However, I had anticipated that when I deleted the shared library, I would only select my contributions. I was concerned that all the photos in the shared library (my wife’s) would be copied over because Apple states that this would occur if anyone was in the library for more than a week. Surprisingly, when I deleted the shared library, it seemed that my wife’s photos were not copied into my library after her leaving it. Instead, I only have what I personally contributed from what I can tell, not a copy of all her photos —so far. Therefore, I’m not entirely certain if the above process was necessary. I believe I could have simply had my wife leave the library on her phone, selecting to keep only what she contributed, and then deleted the library on mine, retaining what I had contributed. In this scenario, the outcome would have been the same —I think.

Apple needs to make this easier, I was dealing with 200k+ photos here and I’m still not sure if the magic that happens in the background of Apple Photos and iCloud is doing what it’s supposed to do. It should be instant when you leave a library and you shouldn’t be worried about all the photos your spouse contributed being copied to your personal library, you just want your photos—likewise for deleting a shared library. I get why anyone else wouldn’t trust doing this and feel stuck using shared library.

Continued…

1 hour later

It’s been about an hour or two later. It was strange because my computer displayed 63k photos (I know I don’t have that many), while my iPhone showed ~43k, and iCloud.com indicated about ~16k (16k seems accurate). So, I restarted the iCloud sync on both my computer and phone. My computer quickly caught up in about 10 minutes, reflecting the same numbers on iCloud.com. However, with my iPhone, this didn’t happen. Instead, it’s been gradually reducing the number of items, and it currently shows 31k. I’m not sure what’s being deleted (I’ve noticed a few of my wife’s photos in my library), but I assume it’s more of my wife’s photos. I’m not sure why they’re even there. On iCloud.com, I don’t see any of them. 

1 day later

My phone’s photo count (approximately 20k) is incorrect when synced with both iCloud.com and my computer (16k). I’m not sure why this is happening, but I’ll try turning off and then turning on my iPhone to see if that resolves the issue…

Later that night

So, the number of photos on my iPhone (approximately 20k) remained unchanged despite trying to turn syncing on and off. However, I noticed that many photos from my wife were still present in my library. I attempted to search for “Shared by X” again, and this time, I was able to view photos shared by my wife. It turned out that there were around 3,5k of photos, most of which had “no lens info” in the meta. Upon closer examination, I realized that these were indeed my wife’s photos that were still in my library. I deleted them. Once I did this, the number of photos in my iPhone library began to align with the approximately 16k number on iCloud.com and my computer.