Stuck at home with Covid while the rest of the family heads off on holiday, I thought I'd try and sort out the multitude of photos that we have. Five minutes in and I am completely baffled.
What is the iCloud? I naively thought that if we we opted for Family Sharing on the iCould then basically we'd all have access to everything. This doesn't seem to be the case.
DH has a MacBook Air which has his Apple ID, as does his phone. On the Photos app on his Mac Air, I can access what I think of as our 'family collection' of digital photos, going back to 2002. Some of them are taken by him, some were taken by me. I'm sure that I used to be able to access the older ones on my phone / laptops. But currently I can only see photos as far back as 2017 on my Iphone or on my own Macbook Air. And I think they are only the ones that I have taken or been sent on What's App etc.
For the photos that DH has that I don't - how do I know where they actually 'are'? If I can see them on the Photos app, where are they? On the hard drive / storage of the Mac / Iphone? Or are the in the cloud?
And how can I set things up so that they are a. safe from being deleted and b. accessible to both of us? And how does the ICloud work? Is it like a big shared storage area or am I misunderstanding it? And how do you more techy people sort out this stuff? Where / how should I be storing digital photos?