How to configure iCloud for a family

Yes but my wife and I are the only "family" without progeny. We share a single email account, share a single calander, a single addrss book. We do everything together. We exclude nothing from each other. The current system causes difficulty for my wife and there are omissions and duplications because you are forced to have separate accounts and isolated calanders of your own on each separate device. This is NOT what we need. We need simplicity, a single account for the both of us on all machines.

We do not need isolated, calanders specific to each device.

aehaas

My reply was more for the original post.

For your case use 2 id's on each computer. Then tick off the calendar, contacts and mail on your wifes id.

Add your id as a secondary one to your wife's Mac and tick there calendar, contacts and mail for your id.

This should work, but I never tried it.

I think I found a solution to share the contacts as well.

So on one Mac put the contacts into the iCloud for that persons master id.

For all the other Macs add this persons id as a secondary one and select "contacts".

This will sync all the contacts to all users including the me-card issue as mentioned.

On each Mac:

First setup your contacts preferences to have the "at your Mac" contacts as default contacts.

Add a new contact for that person and add at least the apple-id as mail address.

Mark this card as the me-card.

Then in the preferences set now iCloud as the default contacts list. (This is needed so that when you add a contact that it is in the iCloud).

So every user will have its personal contact double. One in the iCloud with all the data (for all other members). And one on your local Mac with only the apple-id from iCloud as Email. And this last one is marked as the me-card.

With this setup everybodies me-card is local on the mac and the others have no problem with it anymore.

It looks that this solves the issue, but I might encounter a new problem with this setup later. But after some intial testing it seems to work fine for now.

Hi,

Thanks for the useful replies, we'll be getting an iPad at Christmas and I will try your suggestions then, hopefully this will work. It beats me though why Apple just couldn't let each 'user' have their own iCloud account and have that link to their device and a shared MacBook or iMac, it seems a little silly that the MacBook can only have one iCloud account runnigng from 'Preferences'.

Thanks again, there is a little more hope on the horizon now that I have your suggestions.

Mickey

aehaas wrote:

Yes but my wife and I are the only "family" without progeny. We share a single email account, share a single calander, a single addrss book. We do everything together. We exclude nothing from each other. The current system causes difficulty for my wife and there are omissions and duplications because you are forced to have separate accounts and isolated calanders of your own on each separate device. This is NOT what we need. We need simplicity, a single account for the both of us on all machines.

We do not need isolated, calanders specific to each device.

aehaas

aehaas, you are not "forced to have separate accounts". If you and your wife want to share a single account, then setup one iCloud account for both of you, and use this same iCloud account for each of you on each computer/iphone/ipad to which you have access.

It appears that you may need to move data (calendar, contact) stored locally 'on my mac' into iCloud, but without more specific information it is guessword

MJB I think this a different setup than the original post.

And I think this can work as well.

If you have different login users on the shared Mac than you can setup iCloud for each person individual from each other per user. So you login and you get your iCloud synched with your iPhone/iPad... When another persons logs in than the shown calendar will be synched with that persons iCloud account.

If you both use the same login on the Mac and share everything then you choose the first iCloud account in the preferences for iCloud. And than add the second one under the preferences from "mail....". Both iClouds will be synched and the calendar will show both. If you look at the "mail..." preference than you will see both iCloud accounts and you can select per account what to sync. But I do not think this is the preferrer solution. If you now add a new event on the calendar, it might not always be obvious in which persons iCloud this is placed. You will have to select that specifically when creating the new event.

Thanks for that, we'll get the iPad and give your suggestion a try. Still seems to me that Mobile Me was easier and better than iCloud for us but we'll persevere.

I agree. I have not seen a solution for iCloud that satisfies a family's needs. We share everything as well.

.... still trying to figure out what to do

We figured out how to solve the me-card issue. Basically, once you designate a card as "my card" in Address Book, it updates the corresponding iCloud account. So you only want the primary iCloud account for each mac user account to have a me-card. You don't want any secondary iCloud accounts with me-cards as then Address Book will get confused and you may end up with your spouse's photo for your own card. To get around this, we created a separate account for contacts that we want to share, and we removed omitted each other's contacts from this shared account. The setup for my wife and I looks like the following:

my iCloud contact list (my primary iCloud account, not shared with my spouse at all):

myself (marked as "my card" in address book)

my spouse

spouse's iCloud contact list (my spouse's primary iCloud account, not shared with me at all):

myself

my spouse (marked as her "my card" in her address book)

shared iCloud account (listed as a secondary iCloud account on both mine and my wife's mac user account):

all of our 100+ other contacts

(does not include my card or my spouse's card to avoid duplicates in the Address Book)

Hi Amichalo

I found a solution for this problem. My wife and I both have iPads and we have one Mac computer that we both use.

Setting up the iCloud account on our iPads was easy, just follow the prompts.

Here is the solution to set it up on your Mac:

You must create another user account on your Mac.

Under system preferences choose Users (located at the bottom of the system preference screen).

Then simply follow the prompts as your set up a new user account. This account will serve as a totally different identity on your Mac. Remember that the original account created will serve as the Administrator. So any changes to the subsequent accounts added must be authorized with the Administrator credentials.

Once the new account/identity is created, click on Apple and choose log off Galeonard.

Then click on the new user created and set up iCloud on that new user using your wife's iCloud ID, or your child's iCloud ID, ect.

This way your wife'work and everything else stays separate from your yours and it is password protected. Your iCloud also stays separate because the new ID will have a totally different email, calendar, contacts, ect.

This worked like a charm for me.

Trust it helps you.

Hi tikigiant,

I am approaching that similar.

How did you manage to have an addressbook each but still have contacts you share? Did you find a solution for that as well.

Regards,

Holger

Hi FotoDirk,

I understand your shared Addressbook approach but how did you leverage this shared addressbook on the various iOS devices as any subscribed addressbooks will not be visible on the iOS devices?

Regards,

Holger

again: it appears the customer found a workaround to make due with an Apple problem, not the other way around. Your wife should not have send each calendar item to you and vice-versa. We can set up multips calendars ("home", "work" etc) so why can't one set up a "his" a "hers" and an "ours"?

Sorry for the late reply Holger.

On each IOS device you can create the same Apple-id under mail.... settings. And for each Apple-id you can select what to synchronize. So I did put my Apple-id under my wifes devices and only selected the addressbook to synch on her device and on mine I synch everything.

But this works without a problem like that.

I have for each member in the family an iCloud calendar under that persons Apple-id. And that one is shared with the others. So we all see this iCloud calendar from each other.

Next to the iCloud one you can still create a private one that is not shared.

So I have:

Dirk-iCloud (shared with wife)

Dirk-Work (only for me)

Family-iCloud (shared with wife and kids)

My wife has:

Aline-iCloud (shared with me)

... maybe some privat ones

My kids both have a shared one

Julie-iCloud

Sofie-iCloud

And those are shared with me and my wife.

So I see all these ...-iCloud calendars and my personal ones. And I can even make appointments in those of my wife and kids.

The problem is that there is not (yet) a solution for the addressbook. It would be nice if you could create an addressbook group that you can share with others.