ICloud – Can photos be added to a shared iCloud photo stream album even after it has reached 5000 photos

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Apple says that a shared iCloud photo album can contain a maximum of 5000 photos. What will happen once that limit is reached? Will it not be possible to add any more photos? Or will the oldest photos just silently be deleted to make space for the newest?

Best Answer

First of all, to remove any confusion, iCloud's My Photo Stream, and iCloud Photo Sharing are two different things, and will behave differently.

iCloud Photo Sharing

From the FAQ:

How many photos and videos can be stored in a shared album?

A shared album can hold a maximum of 5000 photos and videos combined. When you reach your limit, you must delete some photos or videos before adding new ones.

My Photo Stream Limits

Uploads to My Photo Stream per month: 25,000 photos

Also note that photos are automatically deleted from your photostream after 30 days.

Related Solutions

ICloud photo sharing limit reached — new photo app

There are multiple absolute and rate limits on iCloud photos. See this article for details:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299

Currently, if I had to guess, you hit one of the 24 hour limits and need do nothing but wait for the time to pass:

Maximum combined number of photos and videos from all contributors per shared album, per hour: 1000
Maximum combined number of photos and videos from all contributors per shared album, per day: 10,000

However, if you continue to have issues or are getting multiple notifications like your screen shot indicates, there could be a fault in the waiting loop code and you'll want to reach out to AppleCare to have engineering look at your account in particular. That isn't quick, but in the end usually works well if you are patient.

ICloud – Share All Photos in iCloud Photo Library to Family Members

According to this article by Serenity Caldwell of iMore, there are three ways to share photos to all your family members.

Use the "Family" album that is automatically created if you have Family Sharing turned on.
Create a shared album.
Use the same iCloud account for all family members.

Nevertheless, there doesn't seem to be a way to automatically share all your photos to your family members. You will still need to copy photos into the share album. (Unless you are all using the same iCloud account, which I didn't want to do, since each user already have their own active iCloud accounts.)