Oliver Haslam on June 26, 2018, 7:54 pm

How To Use The New Photo Sharing Features In iOS 12

With iOS 12, Apple may not have brought the wide ranging changes to the Photos app that many of us had hoped for but that does not mean that the team behind the app has been asleep at the wheel.

With iOS 12, we will instead receive a handful of tweaked and all-new features that are based around the sharing of images, and while we would have preferred something that allowed multiple libraries to be shared and synced with each other, the new smart sharing features are interesting nevertheless.

Although we do not expect iOS 12 to arrive for everyone until later this year, we thought it would be worth taking time out to just run through how some of the new features work – something that we expect to be of use to many more people with the release of the public beta.

One of the new additions is the Sharing Suggestions area within the For You tab. In here, you will see suggestions that have been created for you, with iOS surfacing images that it thinks you might want to share with family and friends. This is also where you will find albums that have been shared with you, too. Sharing suggestions appear as collections with tapping on those collections revealing the images within it.

Should you decide to share a collection, you can open it before tapping the Select button. Tap on the images you want to share and then tap on Next. Here, you’ll be shown a list of potential recipients and all you need to do is select the ones you want to use and then tap Share in Messages. That’s all there is to it.

Users can also share via the more old-fashioned method, which is to select an image to be shared before tapping a new Shared Albums button and then selecting which album to share to and who should be able to see the images. Finally, you have the option of adding a comment before tapping Post.

Sharing images via iOS 12 is perhaps the biggest focus the Photos app has received in this update, but we still feel that it stops just short of ticking all of the boxes for us. Here’s hoping iOS 13 finally ticks them all off!