Family Photo Sharing Should be Easier Than It Is ⭐

We have our photos in Google Photos, Apple Photos, and elsewhere, and sharing that with the family should be easier. But it's not. And I find this confusing, especially given the family sharing capabilities that both companies offer via very expensive annual subscriptions I'm paying for.
?️ But first, an annual task that should also be easier
I belatedly started organizing my 2025 photos this morning, a task I undertake each year since I concluded my digital decluttering work in late 2023. This time, I'm going to document exactly what I'm doing, since I didn't do so last year and this is one of those unfamiliar enough things that I instantly forget what it is that I did.

Granted, it's easier now than ever before: My 2023 push involved decades of scanned photos from the pre-digital era and there was a lot of missing metadata (and still is, that's the nature of this, sadly). And a metric ton of photos, of course, over 130,000 through the end of 2023, anyway.

2024 and 2025 were, and are, a lot simpler, with the caveat that there are a lot of files, roughly 20,000 from each year over 50 GB of storage for each. I back up the photos I take with each phone to Google Photos, OneDrive, and, since I got the two NASes, to Synology Photos, too. On iPhones, I also back up to iCloud/Apple Photos. And my wife backs up her phone to Google Photos, and we have a partnership set up (more on this below), so my Google Photos collection includes her photos (and vice versa).

Given all that, when it comes to new photos, the closest thing I have to a "source of truth" is Google Photos because that's where everything should be (and where most of our photos are). But that also explains why I have to do this annual cleanup work: I need to make sure that all our photos are everywhere, meaning in OneDrive, iCloud/Apple Photos, and Synology, too. So this mini-consolidation involves doing a Google Takeout, which is problematic because there's no way to filter that to just a single year, plus all the phone backups I make: Each time I move on from whatever phone, I copy all the photos I took off it manually just in case.

(It occurs that it may be easier to just download the year's worth of photos from the Google Photos website, tedious as that is. But that's not what I did.)

It's tempting to leave those backups as-is and maybe just put them up on one of the Synology NASes where they can replicate to the other, never to be seen again. And maybe I get there, but when I did this last year for the 2024 photos, I found several or even dozens that were only in one place (probably phone backups, mostly) and not in Google Photos, which was (and is) confusing. So I am doing the full consolidation again this year, at least. Hopefully, this won't be necessary going forward.

2025 is complicated further by all the phones I used last year. At one point or another, I used an Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 17 Pro Max, Google Pixel 9 Pro XL, Google Pixel 10, Pixel 10...