Q: iPhoto '11 and network home directories

OT

I'm simply making the point that there are a lot of end-users in this part of the forum that musn't use Apple computers in an enterprise environment

Apple Education reps have trumpeted iPhoto as an easy program for students to use to manage and edit photos.

I've just stumbled into this problem after upgrading to Lion and the resulting iPhoto upgrade.

To Terence Devlin: Thank you so much for your patience in the face of irate consumers! I've found your responses in almost every search I've made and there's a good chance you have saved me from an embolism.

To Apple: I'm appalled. This reeks of a deliberate ploy. A photo on disk is a file, nothing more or less. Unix has managed to deal with this for > 20 years. I love OSX, but please let it be all it can be without hamstringing it with poorly thought out decisions.

I agree.  Unsupported is one thing but to actively deny access is another. 

Purely dictatorial, pathetic and childish behaviour.  Very, very poor action imho - I would suggest people do not upgrade at all, especially if they have an environment that works where users are just getting used to changing OS.  Where I am, we are going to use Picasa instead now thanks to this - at least that software is appropriately constructed to work across platforms instead of actively blocking certain filesystems.

It's a great shame this company has more and more opted for the approach of the dictatorship, it's pushing enterprise away and now with it, its users; especially where educational institutions are concerned.

There was a time when we flew the flag of Apple with pride.  Now it's increasingly with embarrassment.

Sad times.

What a lot of codswallop.

This is not childish, pathetic or dictatorial. It's simple cost control. This is not what iPhoto is designed to do. When the users attempt to do this it generates suport calls. Support calls - which cannot resolve the issue, btw - are a cost. So, control the costs by removing the cause of the Support Calls.

Quite rational really.

Regards

TD

Now that's codswallop I'm afraid TD .. iphoto not being designed to run on anything other than one filesystem is now true but wasn't stated before and your point about support calling doesn't add up - by doing what they've done, they'll immediately increase the support calls, if there were any to begin with.

By going down this path they are gradually taking away the very thing that made the platform a good choice for educational establishments .. 'designed to' or not, that's the simple truth and that's a shame - not at all rational.

Sad times.

For what it's worth, I've managed to get this to work via an NFS share.

1. Mount the share

2. Browse the share and open the iPhoto Library from within Finder.

It is upgrading my library as we speak. Opening iPhoto and browsing to the library gave me the 'unsupported filesystem' error, but using the above works.

Keep in mind comments about the reliability (or lack of) however. Backups are your friend.

Thank you PJ, I vote your's the best answer in this forum! As for everyone else, perhaps they should get off their high horses and find some solutions!!

I work in an Educational institute and find iPhoto perfect for the students. They are not professionals and do not need professional packages. Most of the time they want to import photos into iPhoto, and then put them into the rest of the iLife suite, like iMovie.

I thought Apples moto was "It just works". Well, some of the time anyway.

Yeah, no problem either. Just remember to mount the NAS in finder (finder->go->connect to server; type in your SMB address). You should be able to import the photos from there by selecting your drive. Seems to be a common issue that people are complaining about, but easily handled.

The problem I am running into with this is that a major flaw was built into iPhoto '11 that wasn't in '09. I have used iPhoto for about 6 years now and I have upgraded with no problems ever before and my photos have always been stored on another computer in my home network. Since upgrading to iPhoto '11, my computer automounts to those drives when I am at home (even when iPhoto is not running) and it now tries to do it at work and I get a "Connection Error" and my computer says it cannot find the computer that is being automounted by iPhoto. I have been trying to debug this as many things. However, I only started having these issues after installing iPhoto '11. Two drives get automounted and they both happen to be drives that store photos that iPhoto accesses. So this has to be the issue. My questions is - why would my computer need to access those drives if iPhoto is not running? Makes no sense.

I have to downgrade to iPhoto '09 as a result.

Bad form Apple. You need to fix this.