Strategy for sharing the same Google Photos account for whole family

Question

I don't see any sharing settings that allows full access to upload/view an entire Google Photos account.

I want to have my phone, my laptop, my wife's phone and her laptop to all sync whatever local photos the devices have to the same Google Photos account.

I don't want to use one of our personal Google accounts, like my personal gmail, because in order for her to log in to see the photos online, she'd have to be able to 2 factor authentication and basically be completely logged in to all my Google services, which would be confusing for her.

Has anyone else figured out the best way? Should we create a new "photos only" Google account?

Answer 1

I have created a "family photos" account, and (using the old Google+ interface), I share each uploaded album with a "Family" list of people, containing - well - my family.

This provides view-only access to all family members without logging in from their own account (I believe viewing constitutes 90% of the access), then if they want to contribute to the family album, they can log in with the family account.

All the above for browser access. For mobile phones, the new Google Photos app allows being logged in from multiple accounts.