Apple Family Sharing: Share photos, apps, movies, location, more

If you have a family, odds are you share a house, furniture, car and more. But you might not give as much attention to what you share in your digital lives, even if your digital pictures and purchases are equally valuable. Luckily, Apple Family Sharing makes it easy to share photos, movies, apps and more.

It just takes a little bit of setup to share iCloud’s fantastic Family Sharing feature. Here are the top six benefits of using it.

Share photos, movies, apps and more with Apple Family Sharing

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Introduced in 2014, and with powerful new features regularly added, Apple’s Family Sharing makes it simple to share photos, apps and more with up to five other people. One person acts as an organizer, inviting other family members (and setting up accounts for children under age 13).

To set up Family Sharing, simply open Settings, tap on your name at the top, and hit Family Sharing. From there, you can add another person’s Apple ID to the group. If you’re setting up an account for a child without an Apple ID, select Create an Account for a Child.

It’s incredibly easy to set up Family Sharing on your Apple devices, and the feature offers a wide variety of benefits.

Table of contents: Top benefits of Apple Family Sharing

1. Family Photo Library
2. Everyone gets iCloud storage
3. Everyone gets everything else, too
4. Shared locations
5. Parental controls for your children
6. Apps and in-app purchases

1. Family Photo Library

Everyone in your family has a different subset of pictures of family events and trips. Some people take pictures without sharing them with everyone else. One family member might take it upon themselves to send all their photos, but they probably don’t have all the photos from everyone else. Setting up a shared photo library can solve that problem. The best part is that photo sharing happens intelligently and automatically.

By default, when you’re taking pictures at home, your photos will be added to the shared library. They’ll also be added when you’re out and about and your phones are near each other — the system assumes this is the kind of family event you might want to share.

From the Camera app, you can always turn this feature on or off by tapping the yellow Family icon.

From the Photos app, you can easily move photos to the shared library or back to your personal library. You’ll also get recommendations in the For You tab for pictures that your iPhone thinks should go in the shared folder. (Screenshots, memes and pictures you save from the web will not be added to the shared library.)

Learn more in our how-to: How to share an iCloud Photo Library.

2. Everyone gets iCloud storage

Backing up your devices to iCloud will help you rest easy at night — especially if some people in your family are clumsy and cavalier with their devices. An iCloud backup means that any replacement iPhones will be restored and set up exactly as the previous device was the night before they were lost.

Luckily, backing up to iCloud doesn’t mean that everyone in your family needs to pay for their own storage. With Apple’s Family Sharing, one person can share the storage they pay for amongst everyone to save money. Activate it in Settings > Family > Subscriptions > iCloud+.

3. Everyone gets everything else, too (mostly)

It’s not just iCloud storage that Family Sharing affects. Some other Apple services that you subscribe to, like Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+ and Apple News+, will be shared automatically as well.

Apple Music, unfortunately, needs to be upgraded to a paid family plan to work with Family Sharing. (This restriction probably results from record companies and royalties — it’s always the record companies.) Still, the Apple Music family plan still costs less than two separate subscriptions, only adding $6 per month to the cost of an individual plan at the time of writing.

4. Shared Locations

When you’re out and about, keeping everybody wrangled together can feel like herding cats. Figuring out where your family members are by texting them and hoping for a swift response is often fraught.

That’s where Location Sharing, one of Apple Family Sharing’s most powerful features, comes in. It’s one of the biggest time-savers and peace-of-mind generators around. You can, and should, turn it on in Settings > Family > Location Sharing. Adults will need to turn it on themselves; children can have it forced upon them.

After you turn on Location Sharing, you will be able to see family members’ locations in the Find My app, directly from iMessage, or by adding a widget to your iPhone’s Home Screen.

Location Sharing also gives you the ability to ring family members’ iPhone speakers. From the Find My app, tap on the Devices tab, select the device in question, and hit Play Sound. It’s much louder than the “ping my phone from my Apple Watch” noise. You’ll be able to see the charge level of your family member’s device, too. This Family Sharing feature is great for locating mislaid Apple gear as well as lost family members..

5. Apple Family Sharing offers parental controls

Family Sharing gives parents lots of options for managing how their children use their Apple devices. For instance, setting up an iPhone or iPad on their behalf is incredibly easy, and you have the power to limit their screen time, internet access and contacts. Plus, setting up Ask to Buy is a great way for your offspring to make purchases in the App Store without the hassle of adding a credit card to their account. And you can approve or deny purchases, so you have full control.

If an iPhone or iPad is too much, you can set up a child with an Apple Watch if you want to see their location, send them an occasional iMessage or give them a call without a full smartphone.

How much control you exert over your children’s digital lives is a highly personal question that someone will always judge you for, no matter what you do. (I had free rein as a kid, but then again, none of these tools existed for Windows 2000. Nor did I carry my Pentium II computer around with me.) Apple Family Sharing lets you make these critical decisions for yourself and your children.

6. Share apps and in-app purchases

If a few people in your family are playing a hot new game, or you all like to use a paid subscription app like Fantastical or Callsheet, you may not need to purchase the download for everyone in your family. Some apps and games offer shared purchases for everyone in your family group via Family Sharing.

If you enable this feature in Settings > Family > Purchase Sharing, your apps and in-app purchases will be shared with everyone in your family (assuming the app’s developers allow the feature). From the App Store, look for the “Supports Family Sharing” label in the app’s information section.

Apple Family Sharing: Bringing the family together … digitally

Your digital life doesn’t have to be fractured and messy. Apple’s Family Sharing feature makes it easy for everyone to have the same pictures, see where you all are, keep your children in check, keep your devices backed up and have access to all the services, media and apps.

Family Sharing is free to set up. If you want to add a subscription to any of Apple’s offerings, you can click right here:

We originally published this how-to on Apple Family Sharing on November 11, 2023. We updated the information on May 22, 2024 and August 14, 2025.