I have five Macs in my house, and I want them all to have the exact same iPhoto library -- but I don’t want to have to download pics from my camera or iPhone five times. I’d like to be able to merge the libraries every few months, but that sounds like a pain. Short of overwriting each computer’s iPhoto library every time one of them changes, is there an easy way to keep my pics in sync?
If you want easy, use iPhoto’s built-in sharing to view a master iPhoto library on every Mac on your network. First, designate one iPhoto library as the one to which you’ll download all new photos -- the computer you use most often makes sense. Launch iPhoto on that machine and select iPhoto > Preferences, then click the Sharing button. Click “Share my photos,” making sure the “Share entire library” option is active. You can also edit the library’s name and give it a password (advisable if you want to keep this Mac’s library private over open Wi-Fi). Leave iPhoto open, then launch iPhoto on another Mac. The shared library will appear in its sidebar under Shares.
iPhoto sharing gets your pictures on other Macs with a few clicks.
To actually merge and sync your pictures across your Macs, check out apps like iPhoto Library Manager ($19.95, fatcatsoftware.com) or SyncPhotos ($19, haystacksoftware.com).
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Fehr
June 17, 2011 at 3:49pm
Be VERY careful when messing with your iPhoto library. I had moved mine from my Mac to a network share, where it lived for a couple of years. Then when I got a new iMac, I moved it to that. As it turns out, only _references_ to the photos were moved, so everything appeared to be fine. When I eventually deleted the old iPhoto library, everything still seemed to be fine, as the thumbnails for the photos were cached locally.
Only when I actually tried to open a photo and got the dreaded exclamation mark did I realized that something was wrong. By then, it was far too late, and all the photos of my wedding, the birth of my son, videos of his first steps, and basically every photo from the first two years of his life was GONE.
Upon looking at the cause of the problem, I discovered that there was a small check-box that I needed to check to make sure that the files were moved, and not just references to the files.
As I said, be VERY careful.
opiapr
June 17, 2011 at 4:58pm
In iPhoto preferences you can select to have the pictures copied to the library instead of just referencing to them kind like iTunes does.
But just like you I did the same with my iTunes library a couple of years ago.
