Copy photos between different users without Permissions issues

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Copy photos between different users without Permissions issues

I want to share photos with my wife. As far as I know, even with family sharing, Apple does not allow for the sharing of photos ... the entire lot ... with Facial recognition etc. Not a pointless stream of consciousness or sharing them one by one!

It does not have to be 2-way interaction, I am happy to make one computer the 'main' import device, and periodically copy the whole photos folder across to the other computer (via an external HDD)

Why I am writing is that I have been scraping together my twin's files from 4 different (ancient Macs) onto an external drive, with a view to putting them onto their new Macs. Everywhere I turn, I get to inconsistent and seemingly insoluble permissions problems ...

Will I have the same issues with the photos?

(I do not want to 'import' photos ... apart from being slow, hours of metadata will be lost!)

Thanks.

Posted on Dec 23, 2020 9:04 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

léonie

Level 10

195,285 points

Dec 23, 2020 11:12 AM in response to Folbo

If you want to avoid permission issues, the shared Photos Library needs to be on volume, where you can enable the "Ignore Ownership on this volume" flag. This requires a separate volume, a separate partition, or a separate drive. And the volume must not have been used for Time Machine backups or have any other backup software installed.

The best thing would be to get yourself a portable drive and prepare it as described here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

Once you have copied your master photos library to this separate drive, you can plug it into the computer where you want to use it from separate user accounts. only one suer should be looked in at a time, so the library is not in use by a different user.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

195,285 points

Dec 27, 2020 2:17 AM in response to Folbo

Photos must not be running, when you copy the library. To be sure, that Photos is not running, restart the Mac, before you copy the library.

If you still encounter problems, you may want to repair the copy of the library on your wife's Mac. ( Repair the library)

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Answer 3

Folbo Author

Level 1

105 points

Dec 27, 2020 2:10 AM in response to léonie

Thanks ... that was useful ... I think it did solve the problem ... time will tell!

The external drive that I was copying to was already ignoring permissions (I had not noticed that setting before ... useful).

The drive was ignoring instead of removing. When I came to copying the files onto my wife's Mac, the permissions were still there ... at least three of them were.

The screenshot shows an issue for "Data.noindex", there were two others ... "Modified" and "Data". These three files are aliases/symbolic links. I could also find them in the original location on my Mac. The original links themselves, on my Mac, all resolved to not being able to find the original. I do not know what they are.

Most importantly though ... on my Wife's Mac ... I was able to opt-click on photos, switch to the new library, and the library was opened, seemingly correctly ... so life it good :-)

Thank you.

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Copy photos between different users without Permissions issues

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