If you’ve taken photos of your family with an Android phone, you’ve probably faced a situation where your partner or spouse wanted you to send them everything you captured when you got home. You can always email or text them, but it’s complicated, especially when there are a lot of photos to share. But with the right Google Photos setting, you actually don’t need to send photos. In Google Photos, you can set up something called Partner Sharing. Once done, all photos uploaded to your account will be shared with an authorized person. You can also personalize access by only sharing photos uploaded after a certain date, or by only sharing photos of a specific person, such as photos of them or photos of your children. This goes without saying, but never share access with someone you don’t trust. Additionally, you can only designate one partner at a time.
However, its setup is quite simple. Open the Google Photos app, tap your profile photo in the top right, then go to Settings Photos > Sharing > Sharing with Partners. In this menu, specify the start date or simply share all your photos (you can also select photos with certain people in them), then invite your partner with the Select Partner option. Anyone you invite will need to have an active Google account, so keep that in mind. You can also set up a partner in the Google Photos web app on desktop. At any time, you can revoke access to the entire library, delete certain photos you own if you no longer wish to share them, or change your partner’s settings, so you always have full control over any content you share.
Why use Partner Sharing in Google Photos?
Sending photos via SMS is quite complicated, especially if you send a lot of photos. Additionally, these photos are often sent at reduced quality over a mobile network, and if the person you’re sending them to doesn’t download or save them, it can be difficult to return to them later in a chat interface. Sharing all your photos through Google Photos is quick and easy, and your partner never needs to download them unless they want to keep them locally. For your part, you can easily download all the photos you capture with the Google Photos app, which automatically backs up your library. If you instead use a computer to back up your Google Photos, the service is making a big change in August, so you’ll want to learn about it to continue to keep your photos secure. Mainly, you will have to download them manually to the desktop.
The biggest downside to sharing with partners, of course, is that you can only designate one partner, so you can’t openly share your library with a group. However, you can create albums and share them with multiple people. While you’re at it, you might want to turn off the Google Photos feature that trains AI using your personal media before creating a large library. If you don’t want to use Google’s platform at all or want to move away from it, there are some great alternatives to Google Photos that also allow you to share your photos. However, there is no such thing where you can add a trusted partner.
