If You’ve Been Using iCloud Shared Albums to Keep Your Favorite Family Photos, There’s Something You Probably Didn’t Know

Apple Photos is getting two substantial sharing upgrades in iOS 27, with a new slideshow creator and a major overhaul of iCloud Shared Albums that removes some of the feature’s biggest restrictions.

Slideshows can now be customized with transitions, timing, and music before being exported as a video, while Shared Albums preserve photos and videos at their original resolution and allow people without Apple devices to participate.

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Slideshows can now be created and exported

Photos has supported slideshows for years, but the existing feature offers little control over the finished presentation.

It works well enough for quickly playing a collection of photos, but not for putting together something you might want to show at a family gathering, event, or presentation.

iOS 27 adds a proper editor that lets you combine photos and videos, choose transition styles, adjust how long individual slides remain on screen, and add music. Slideshows can also be set to loop automatically.

More importantly, the finished slideshow can be exported as a video file. That means you can create it once and send the finished presentation to someone else, save it for later, or play it on another device without having to recreate the slideshow inside Photos.

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Shared Albums no longer sacrifice image quality

Shared Albums have traditionally come with a significant compromise: photos and videos added to them are reduced in quality rather than being preserved in their original form.

iOS 27 removes that restriction. Photos and videos uploaded to a Shared Album can now remain at full resolution, so downloading an image from the album later no longer means getting a lower-quality copy of the original.

Apple is also opening participation beyond its own devices. Android and Windows users can join and contribute to Shared Albums, making the feature considerably more practical for families, trips, weddings, and other groups where not everyone owns an iPhone.

Album creators get more control over those participants as well, including the ability to decide who can contribute content and who can only view it.

Emoji reactions have also been expanded beyond the more limited reaction options previously available.

Together, these changes make Shared Albums much closer to a place where a group can collect and keep everyone’s original photos rather than simply view compressed copies.