A Family Hub is a shared space with one storage plan behind it. Everyone in the hub reaches the same albums, and everyone can add to them.
That last part is what makes it different from most family photo apps, where one person uploads and everyone else watches.
One plan, several people#
Instead of each person paying for their own storage and sending photos to each other, a household has one plan. Photos added to the hub's albums use the hub's storage, whoever uploaded them — so someone on a free personal account can add to a hub all day without touching their own space.
One person handles the payment. Everyone else just uses it.
Everyone can add#
A hub isn't a feed you broadcast. Every member can add photos and videos to its shared albums, and what they add is there for everyone else.
If you've been the person who collects everyone's photos and organises them, this is the point at which that stops being one person's job.
It's a household, not an audience#
The distinction that matters: a hub is for the people you'd share a phone gallery with anyway — your partner, your kids, sometimes a parent who lives with you. It isn't the mechanism for showing photos to the wider family.
For that, circles let you share particular albums with particular groups while the albums stay yours.
Put simply: a hub is where the family's photos live; circles are who else gets to see them.
Being in a hub doesn't cost you privacy#
Joining a hub doesn't make everything you own shared. Any member — not only whoever set it up — can create an album that's private to them inside the hub. It uses the shared storage like anything else, and nobody else in the hub can see it.
See Shared and private hub albums.
You can be in more than one#
Several hubs is normal: your own household, and your parents'. Each is separate, with its own storage, members and albums, and you switch between them.
What it costs#
A Starter Hub is free — 10 GB shared between up to three people, with no card. Larger plans add more storage and more members; the current list is on the pricing page.
The larger plans also unlock the things tied to storage size, like keeping print-ready originals of your photos and searching your library by describing what's in a picture. Those follow the hub's plan for anything stored in the hub — see Hub storage and billing.