Accessing photos in the “Shared With You” album from Messages

The Messages app has a “Shared With You” setting that is enabled by default which will make photos and videos sent to you via Messages appear in your Photos library. This page describes how these photos/videos appear in Photos and PowerPhotos, since not all the interactions are obvious.

If “Shared With You” settings is enabled in Messages, then the photos you receive from other people will show up in a “Shared With You” album in the Sharing section of the album list in Photos. This album will only appear when viewing the system photo library, not any other libraries. If you disable the setting in the Settings window in Messages, then the album disappears. That part’s pretty simple.

Where it can get confusing is that Photos can also show those shared photos inline by date with all the other photos in your library when you’re browsing through the “All Photos” view. Those photos show with a little “message bubble” badge in the lower left, and if you view the photo full size, it will show you who it came from in a little control near the top of the photo. This is controlled by the View > Shared With You menu item in Photos. If you use that to disable showing photos shared from Messages, then they will no longer appear alongside other photos in your library.

When that setting is active, the shared photos aren’t actually in your library, they’re just displayed alongside all the other photos in your library. In this state, the photos won’t show up in PowerPhotos at all.

Then, if you open one of those shared photos, there’s a “Save Shared Photo” button up in the toolbar. If you click that, then the photo is actually saved to your library and will appear in PowerPhotos as well. Photos can also be saved this way by clicking the little “down arrow” button next to them in the Messages app. The photos will continue to appear in the “Shared With You” album, but will no longer have the “message bubble” icon displayed in the corner of the photo.

So, if there are certain photos that you see displayed in Photos but not in PowerPhotos, those may be photos that were shared via Messages but have not been specifically saved to the Photos library.