Happy Christmas all.

OK, so I have our iPhoto library located in the ‘Shared’ folder on our family iMac, this allows my wife and I to share the library from both our user accounts which is very convenient. However I have just come across a problem with Photostream, once the library is associated with one iCloud account it won’t connect to another…and of course you can’t share an iCloud account…. Hmmmmm

Has anyone any suggestions for a more flexible setup? What I want to avoid is having to import photo’s twice to two seperate iPhoto libraries (which would solve the iCloud issue). I don’t mind having two libraries if that’s what’s required as I have the HDD space, but i would like to be able to keep the two in sync easily. Ideally I’d like to avoid it if i can.

I have a copy of iPhoto Library manager which I’m thinking might be the key? As a seperate point my library is around 70GB. Any problems here or do I need to take action?

Thanks in advance.

I thought you could share icloud accounts? My wife & I do…

Dont know about the rest of the problem, sorry..

If you ever find out let me know. I’ve spent far too many wasted hours trying to have a shared iPhoto library and gave it up as a bad job. However my wife rarely uses the Mac so I tend to share pictures to her iPad via Photostreams.

70GB! Have you thought about Aperture? It won’t change your iCloud problems but it makes photo management for 1000s of photos a bit more controlled than iPhoto.

You’re right that you can only connect iPhoto/Aperture to 1 iCloud account. It sounds like you want to share the same photos with your wife and have you both upload your photos to the same photo stream and have them both end up in the same photo library. Easy: log into the same iCloud account from each user account or iOS device for photo sharing.

Cheers PPP oh, and happy New Year too.

I see that we can both log on to the same iCloud account but as iCloud lso manages (syncs) contacts, calendar etc it’s not quite so straight forward – or am I missing something?

I’ve considered Aperature before and will take another look however as I think ‘iPhoto Library Manager’ might be my solution do you know of anything that does the same job with Aperature?

Guys I’ll update this thread if I find a solution, might be a little slow coming though. Slowtortoise It’s fairly easy to share a library between user accounts but there are a few issues with admin rights, I have to use third party software to reset every now and again, I’ll post up how I did it later as need to remind myself…!

It may be too late for you now, considering you’ve got 70gb on iPhoto, but I use Picasa (a google software). I cam share and update photos from either user and store unlimited photos online using Picasa Web. The photos stored online are lower resolution, so not a permanent backup, just a way of accessing photos on my iPad when not at home.

The main benefit of Picasa to me is that I keep control of the folder structure. I am rather particular about storing photos in folders of year and sub-folders for month, and iPhoto seemed to take this option away from me.

Thanks Fanatic but a clouded solution is not ideal for me. As you note the library is a little portly and I want to manage it locally…

Stilltortoise, I’ve been rummaging around online this morning and found this information on Apple’s support forum;

Sharing iPhoto libraries

It gives you everything you need to share a library between multiple users. I wish this had been up when I did mine and it would have saved me hours of messing about. It also address’s the permissions (admin) issue I noted above. I’ll be re organising mine today it seems 😳

If you do use iCloud across devices be careful to set each device to sync/not sync appropriately.

I recently got an iPhone and set it up on iCloud along with the home computer and her iPad. It was only a couple of days later that I found out she was getting all my text messages on her iPad! Fortunately I’ve nothing to hide, although she did find out what her Xmas present was.

What about running it all on an external network? You can buy network drives quite cheap, then much like offices all devices can be linked up and access the stored files.

Alternatively you could use another cloud software.
I use Dropbox for a lot of things, files all stored in cloud, every person has their own account but you share the same folders.

Ask1974, they were the instructions I used. The problem was that the disk image didn’t always mount even when added as a login item. It was 12 months ago so maybe there was something buggy that’s since been fixed. I also found that messing around with the library too much caused corruptions and I’m still copying pics to a new non-corrupt library (using iPhoto Library Manager) as a result. I love using iPhoto but I’ve pulled far too much hair out trying to tinker with the way it’s designed to work. Good luck 🙂