Family sharing

Create a family and invite people

Open Family to create a family, then invite people by email. An invite is for the recipient’s account; send it only to someone you trust with the shared information.

Invited people can accept or decline the invitation from their account. Expired or no-longer-needed invitations can be removed.

Understand family roles

Owners manage the family itself: renaming it, inviting or removing people, changing roles (including transferring ownership), and deleting the family. Members can view the family and its shared containers, add their own containers to the family, and update containers they own. Viewers have read-only access—they can see the family and any containers shared with it but cannot add, edit, or remove anything. Keep ownership to people who should be able to manage everyone’s access.

Before an owner leaves a family that still has other members, ownership must first be transferred to another member. A sole owner cannot simply leave, but they can choose to delete the family, which removes it for everyone and takes them out of it in the same step.

Share only what is needed

Review a container before sharing it with a family. People in the family should only see storage details that are appropriate for them to know. Remove a member or change their role when their access should change.