TigerJon
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Q: Help needing sharing photos between users

I am a Mac newbie and am having a difficult time sharing photos between users on my new machine. I have a user account set up for myself (primary), my wife (having admin privileges), and my daughter. Our Mac came with Photos for Mac installed. We have over 10k photos on an external HD I want to import into PfM, create albums, and share between all of us, but I'm concerned only some of this is possible and only by way of iCloud. I prefer not to use iCloud for our media since we have so much, subsequently the month to month charges would really add up. We have a 1TB HD on our Mac and 3TB of external storage I'd rather utilize. Is there any way to share the photos between users sans iCloud and if so, can the albums one user creates be shared too? If none of this is possible using PfM, would iPhoto be a better app to use for our needs? In case it helps to know, all three of us have iPhones and I use an iPad that could be figured into the mix, but we are okay with manually adding pics we take to the library if need be. Also, we purchase Apple Care but to this point, an advisor has not been able to give me any solid advice on this. Thanks for any advice.

Posted on May 5, 2015 7:51 AM

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TigerJon

Q: Help needing sharing photos between users

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  • by LarryHN,

    LarryHN LarryHN May 5, 2015 7:50 AM in response to TigerJon
    Level 10 (84,632 points)
    Photos for Mac
    May 5, 2015 7:50 AM in response to TigerJon

    you can share using iCloud or an external drive that is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) with ownership ignored - same as iPhoto - iPhoto: Sharing libraries among multiple users - Apple Support

     

    LN

  • by TigerJon,

    TigerJon TigerJon May 5, 2015 7:52 AM in response to LarryHN
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 5, 2015 7:52 AM in response to LarryHN

    Larry,

     

    Thanks for the fast response. A question I failed to ask was, if photos are shared through iCloud, do the necessarily need to be stored in the cloud? Again, trying to avoid the month to month fees for all the storage we'd need.

  • by LarryHN,

    LarryHN LarryHN May 5, 2015 7:55 AM in response to TigerJon
    Level 10 (84,632 points)
    Photos for Mac
    May 5, 2015 7:55 AM in response to TigerJon

    Basically yes - you could each have you one library and use PhotoStream to share photos but then all photos are duplicated in each account

     

    LN

  • by TigerJon,

    TigerJon TigerJon May 5, 2015 8:13 AM in response to LarryHN
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 5, 2015 8:13 AM in response to LarryHN

    It'll probably make more sense for us to use our 2GB seagate (1TB partitions [one holding our Time Machine backup]) rather than iCloud since we don't want multiple files of every photo eating up memory.

     

    A few more questions:

     

    Based on the article you sent me, will I need to dump all of our photos into PfM before starting step 1? I've only imported about 300 photos to this point.

     

    How will we integrate photo stream using this method? Will each user manually import into All Photos from their stream?

     

    If a user with admin privileges creates an album, will it be shared across users (and be writable by admin)?

     

     

    Thanks.