I’m considering the HDD on my macbook HDD. My wife and I have seperate user accounts but want to share the same iphoto library. Apple help suggests either using an external HDD (which I don’t have) or partitioning the HDD. Will partitioning the HDD slow the laptop down? It’s the last macbook and already a bit slow.

Yes we could have a single user account but from what I’ve read this will cause loads of headaches with two iphones on the same account.

Many thanks,

It won’t slow it down, but it is a headache. You’ll need to clone or back up the drive to another drive. Then boot to the recovery partition. Then you’ll need to open Disk Utility, partition the drive. etc etc. You’d be better off just popping over to Dabs.com or your local PC store and buying a 1TB portable HDD. Buy a second one at the same time and you can then make sure you have an off-site back up too.

An easier thing to consider is: login as the administrator (neither of your user accounts should have admin rights, but I figure you know that*) and create a separate folder on your current drive to which both users have read/write access. Move the iPhoto library there. Then point to that library when you open up iPhoto next time round.

As long as users close iPhoto before logging out of their sessions your iPhoto library might stay OK. Good luck.

*Mac hardening Apple NSA Sans

[edit] would you post a link to the Apple support document you cited about partitioning the drive? I’m intrigued by that. Does it pre-date the most recent version of iPhoto?

Just have two user accounts and make one of the account’s “Pictures” folder a “symbolic link” to the other user’s “Pictures” folder

There are utilities that will do Symlinks instead of having to type in the terminal, but it’s just like an “alias” but lower level.

using an external HDD (which I don’t have)

Why not?
So you have no back-up of your images/data? They are only £40-£50 for a USB one.

+1 for Marthall’s idea. Neat. Although I do not like the idea of another user having any access to a folder in another user’s account folder.

@MrSmith perhaps woodlikesbeer uses an online backup service like Backblaze? Nonetheless, not having a spare HDD hanging around sounds scary to me. You never know when you might need one 🙂

Sorry, I just noticed:

It’s the last macbook and already a bit slow.

Really? My other half uses a 2006 white macbook C2D with 3GB RAM and Lion. It does fine with iPhoto, Word and all that kind of stuff. Struggles with HD video for sure but works OK otherwise. I admit it does have a 255GB SSD rather than its original 80GB 5400RPM HDD.

Thanks for the replys. I do have two external HDD. One is for old stuff and plays up everynow and then so I don’t trust it. The other is the one I use for Time Machine backups. Don’t have a spare £50 at the moment so new external HDD isn’t an option. Plus if I understand correctly Time Machine won’t back up stuff on external HDD’s?

This is what I got from Apple: Sharing iPhoto librarys.

Reading it in more detail it seems both options they suggest are less than perfect.

Is Marthall’s method a simpler way of doing what suggestted?

or just use the /users/shared folder?

the symbolic link idea won’t work because the permission on the folder being linked too will most likely not be permissive enough to allow the second user to read and write to it.

Time machine does back up to an external HDD, thats its main use isn’t it?

there’s lots of good reasons to partition many of which are here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning#Benefits_of_multiple_partitions

I do it for the reason of data isolation

TimeMachine backs up to an external HDD. But it won’t back up any external HDD connected to the mac. I.e. if I had all my photos on an external HDD they wouldn’t get backed up. At least that’s what my bro concluded after several hours fiddling with my parents mac mini. Correct me if this is wrong anyone?