How to set up a Google Photos shared album for your missionary

An album takes a few minutes to set up, and then it is easy to never think about it again. That is the right instinct — it is the least work you can ask of someone with one hour on preparation day and a phone that struggles to send a photograph.

The trouble is that the usual way round puts two years of pictures inside an account with an expiry date on it. A shared album is not a place of its own. It is a window into one Google account's library, open for exactly as long as that account is, and a family who only ever viewed it keeps nothing.

Here is how to set one up so that does not happen: who should make it, how to share it so they can add rather than only look, what to do about the captions, and how to end up with a copy that is genuinely yours. None of it needs anything bought from us, and only your own Google storage may cost you. We make something, described in one section near the bottom you can skip.

The one decision that makes it last

Whoever creates the album owns it. That is the whole thing.

If your missionary creates it from their missionary.org account, the album lives inside the account that will one day close, and the link you were sent closes with it. If you create it, from a personal Google account that is not going anywhere, the album is yours and they are invited in as a contributor. When their account goes, your album is still in your library.

There is a second half. An album is only a container; the pictures in it were uploaded by whoever added them, so owning the album is not the same as owning the photographs. Getting a copy, further down, is how you close that gap — and it is the easiest step to put off.

If their album already exists, do not unpick it. Make a second one that you own, ask them to add to that from now on, and save the older pictures across while the first still opens.

Making the album, and sharing it so they can add

Do this on a computer. Google moves these labels between the app and the browser, so if a word below is not on your screen, look for its neighbour.

1. Go to photos.google.com, signed in to the permanent personal account that should own this. Not a work account you might one day leave.
2. In the left sidebar click Albums, then Create album.
3. Name it something you will still understand in ten years — their name and their mission, not "Mission".
4. Put one photo in it. The farewell photo will do.
5. Open the album, click the three-dot menu at the top right, and choose Options.
6. Turn on link sharing. Then turn on Collaborate.
7. Use Share to create the link, and copy it.
8. Send them the link in the weekly email, where they can find it again.

Step six is the one that matters and the one that is missed. Link sharing lets anyone holding the link look. Collaborate is a separate setting, and it is the one that lets them add. If Collaborate is left off, the album simply stays empty: your missionary can open the link and look at it, and nothing they tap will let them add.

To add photos they must be signed in to a Google account of their own; their missionary.org account does this fine. If their phone also allows a personal Google account, ask them to add from that one — that copy is on nobody's clock. Many will not, and the rest of this page assumes yours does not.

One thing plainly: they should never send you their password and never read you a verification code — not to you, not to us, not to anyone. If they need help, sit beside them, or use a screen share on preparation day.

Getting it to work on a phone with bad signal

Ask for one habit, not a system. On preparation day, open the album, add the week, close the phone. A weekly habit survives a mission; a daily one does not. Then make the uploads small enough to finish.

• In the Google Photos app, open Settings, then Backup, and set the upload quality to Storage saver. It compresses, and on a weak connection that is the difference between an album that fills and one that does not. The cost is real: the copy in the album is no longer the original file.
• Leave uploads on Wi-Fi, so photos arrive in a lump when they reach a connection they can use rather than failing on mobile data. And ask them to add clips separately: a video is many times the size of a picture and holds up everything behind it.
• If the phone will not cooperate at all, fall back to email. A photo attached to the weekly letter is a photo you already have, in your own inbox, permanently.

Captions, and where they go

In Google Photos the caption is the photo's description. Open a photo, open the information panel — the small i, or swipe up on a phone — and type into the box that says Add a description.

Two things about descriptions we can say with confidence, because we tested them rather than read about them. A shared album's public page carries no descriptions at all: we checked a real album with 253 items in it and not one was exposed, so anything reading an album through its link cannot bring the words across — ours included. Google's own export, Takeout, does carry them, in a small file beside each photo holding the description and the date the picture was taken.

So a sentence your missionary types under a photo lives in their account and comes out of it only, in an export they run themselves. A comment typed in the album's conversation is not a description either — different feature, different place.

Which leads to the advice that matters most here: the caption that survives everything is the sentence in the weekly email. Ask them to name people in the letter — who is on the left, what the street was called, why they took it — and not only in the description box. The letter is in your inbox. The description is in an account that closes.

What happens when the account closes

A shared album link is served by the account that owns the album. When the Church closes and then deletes a missionary.org account, an album created inside it goes with everything else, and the link in your email stops working. There is no notice and no countdown. It works, and then one day it does not.

On timing, take every number you read as reported, not published. Families widely report losing access around ninety days after the release date and deletion some months later — but those figures are reported rather than official Church policy, the policy has changed at least once before, and the Church's own technology forum carries contradictory answers. Nobody can give you your date. This page cannot either.

The one reliable test is theirs to run: have your missionary sign in at mail.missionary.org and tell you whether it still opens. Everything follows from that answer, and the full rescue is in a separate guide.

An account the Church has deleted cannot be recovered — not by Google's recovery form, not by us, not by anyone selling you the opposite.

How to get a copy that is actually yours

Three routes, best first. Do the first now and the second once a year.

1. Save the photos into your own library as you go. Open the shared album signed in to your own Google account, select the photos — click the first one's checkmark, hold Shift, click the last — and use the option to add them to your library. It appears as a save or add-to-library control. This is the route that builds a second, independently owned copy as you go, without asking anything of your missionary. It uses your own Google storage, so two years of photographs may push you onto a paid Google plan.

2. A Google Takeout export from the account that owns the photos. Only they can run it, signed in as themselves. It is the route that brings the descriptions and reliable taken-dates, and the only one that reaches the rest of their library — the photos that never made it into any album. The steps are in the guide to saving the account.

3. Download the album. Open it, use the three-dot menu, and take Download all if it is offered. Check what you got before you trust it: open a handful of the files and see whether the dates and any descriptions came with them.

Then two copies in two places — an external drive and a cloud account that is not the same Google account. A single laptop is not a backup.

One thing we make

The part you can skip. The steps above work without it.

Paste the album's share link once on our Photos page and press Connect. The first import starts immediately; after that a check runs every hour and brings in up to forty new items a run, so a two-year back catalogue comes across over a day or two rather than in one go. It reads an album you own as happily as one they own, and we never sign in to anyone's Google account. Pictures are dated by the capture date inside the file, or by the album's own timestamp when the file carries none, so a lump arriving three weeks late still files under the week it was taken.

Three honest limits. We read the album's web page rather than a Google API, because Google closed third-party access to photo libraries in March 2025; that is an unofficial surface, so three failed checks in a row turn the source red on your Photos page with the reason written out. Captions cannot come across that route — for those you upload a Takeout zip, whose sidecar files we do read. And there is no self-serve export of your gallery yet; ask us and we produce one.

Videos are kept on Premium; on Standard the album's photographs come across and the clips stay in the album, where they remain yours. That, and the weekly call recording itself without anyone pressing anything, is the entire difference between the tiers. The archive is $49 to set up and $19 a month, or $24 on Premium — the numbers are on the pricing page.

The checklist

1. Create the album yourself, from a permanent personal Google account.
2. Turn on link sharing and Collaborate.
3. Send them the link in the weekly email.
4. Ask for one habit: add the week's photos on preparation day.
5. Set their upload quality to Storage saver, and leave uploads on Wi-Fi.
6. Ask them to type descriptions, and to name people in the letter as well.
7. Once a month, save the new photos into your own Google library.
8. Once a year, have them run a Takeout export from their own account.
9. Keep two copies in two places, and never ask for their password or a verification code.