In iOS 27, a Shared Album you create will start consuming your iCloud storage — and so will every photo and video anyone else adds to it. The change, spotted in the beta and reported by MacRumors, ends a long-standing arrangement in which the first 5,000 items in Shared Albums sat outside your storage quota entirely. iOS 27 is still in public beta and ships in September.
You pay for what your guests upload
Start with the part that will surprise people after the fact rather than before it. If you create a Shared Album and invite twelve relatives to a wedding album, the photos those twelve people contribute count against your iCloud storage, not theirs. You are the host, and hosting now has a bill attached.
That mechanic lands alongside a second change that makes it considerably more expensive. Apple is opening Shared Album contribution to the web, so people can join and add to an album without an Apple account or an Apple device at all — Android and Windows users included, via iCloud.com. Widening the pool of contributors is a genuinely good feature. It also directly increases the volume of other people’s media landing in a bucket you are paying for.
Anyone on Apple’s free tier will feel this fastest. The free iCloud tier is 5GB — that is what September’s new iPhones ship with — and a handful of full-resolution videos from other people’s phones will make short work of that.
What you get in exchange
The upside is real and long overdue. Shared Albums have always downscaled what you put in them — photos reduced to 2,048 pixels on the long edge, panoramas allowed up to 5,400 pixels wide. In iOS 27, both keep their full resolution. If you have ever pulled a photo out of a friend’s Shared Album and found it unusable for anything larger than a phone screen, that is the problem being fixed.
So the trade is legible: Shared Albums stop being a free, lossy convenience and become a full-quality feature billed to the album’s owner. That is a defensible design. What makes it worth flagging plainly is that the cost falls on someone who did not upload the files, and Apple has not yet updated its support documentation to describe any of this.
The free escape hatch, and what to do about it
iOS 27 does add a genuinely free option: temporary Shared Albums, which do not touch your iCloud storage and do not require iCloud Photos. The catch is in the name. After 30 days, anything not saved to someone’s own library is deleted. For a weekend trip or a one-off event that is the right tool. For a running family album it is not.
Two practical things to know before September:
- Your existing albums are safe by default. Shared Albums created before iOS 27 are unaffected unless you act.
- The “Upgrade Shared Album” option is opt-in, and it costs you. The Photos app offers it for existing albums that you want at full quality — take it and that album’s contents start counting against your storage.
If you are the person in your family who hosts the group album, the sensible move is to leave your existing albums alone, use temporary albums for events, and treat “Upgrade Shared Album” as a paid button rather than a quality setting. All of this is beta behaviour and could still change before release, but the direction of travel is not ambiguous.
Source: MacRumors
