To use Shared Photos, sign in first.
This page explains how it works. The tool itself is inside your SeniorThrive account.
Shared Photos is for sharing photographs with your Circle. The page puts it simply: share photos with your circle.
Where to find it
Open Family & Friends and choose Shared Photos.
Adding a photograph
Tap Share photos at the top of the page. If you have not shared anything yet, there is a Share your first photo button lower down that does the same thing.
You can add a picture from your phone or tablet, or bring one across from Google Photos. The Google picker shows you your albums, you open one, and you tick the individual photographs you want. Only the ones you tick come across. Your library stays where it is.
Add a caption if you would like one, and choose whether the photo goes to Family or to Care.
Further down the page, Take a photo and Share it here are a short explainer of those steps rather than buttons, so tapping them does nothing.
These photos are private
Your photographs go to your Circle and nowhere else. There is no public feed, no profile a stranger can find, nothing to go viral, and nobody outside the people you have chosen can see them. This is not social media with a nicer name.
If a family member opens this page and sees the heading These photos are private, that is not an error and the album is not empty. It means photo sharing is turned off for them at the moment, which is a privacy choice and can be changed.
If you have no Circle yet, the page says No Circle yet, because there is nobody to share with until somebody is in it.
What it is good for
Ordinary photographs, mostly. The garden, the dog, what you had for lunch, the state of the weather.
The dull ones are the point. A grandchild in another country does not want a curated album once a year, they want to know that Tuesday happened. A photograph of a bad haircut does more for a relationship than a good photograph of a landmark.
It is also easier than a phone call on the days when a phone call is too much. Sending a picture is a way of saying "I am here and I am alright" that costs almost nothing.
What it does not do
It does not post anywhere else. Nothing goes to Facebook, nothing is published, and no link exists that somebody could pass on to a stranger.
Nobody gets a read receipt on a photograph, and there is no count of who opened it, so there is no scorekeeping about who is paying attention. What the older adult does get, on her Privacy & Sharing tab and for her eyes only, is a record of who else opened her information in the last 30 days, listed by role and by day.
If a photo does not load
If the page says it could not load your photos, it is usually the connection rather than anything lost. Your photographs are not deleted by a failed load. Try again when you have a better signal.