share iPhoto-library with other user account?

Yes both still work with Apple TV as long as your iPhoto application knows where the library is, other services will too.

Faster user switching is fine as long as iPhoto is closed completely.

The important thing in making sure this works is the 'ignore ownership' option which is applicable only to external hard drives or to disk images. You can't set the 'ignore ownership' option for the main hard rive that houses the OS. Hence you end up getting the permissions errors.

Thank you. I'll try the external drive then.

Thanks for the reply.

TD: I think putting iPhoto in the shared folder shares it with all users, whereas this method shares only with users in the group photoshare.

So far, no permissions issues with the library.

TD: The external drive option is a good one, but it isn't for everyone. Some people in the forums complained about speed. I can't use it because I use Backblaze to back up my computer off site, which does not allow back up of an external disk. The steps I wrote down here are aimed at people who want to share a library with certain user accounts, not all accounts, and who don't want to use an external disk or disk image.

The problem is that setting permissions on the enclosing Folder doesn't really make any difference at all to the permissions in the iPhoto Library. See jh5684's posts above you - and many others on the forum. The Library is an entity unto itself, pretty much independent of the Finder's permissions - hence it's own methiod for repairing persmissions on the Library. So while it can work for a while - and quite a long while - we do see a lot of people reporting issues on this set up.

FYI. I bought an external drive and copied our iPhoto file. Everything appears to work as advertised (haven't tried editing yet). The drive is a simple USB 3.0 drive; not a particularly fast drive, but we don't notice any difference in access to our photos (reported by some). Our apple TV's work (as long as we're both logged-in). No complaints.

The "old" iPhoto file remains in the Shared folder for the time being and I've noticed that we sometimes are prompted to select a library

Lots of great info on this thread; thank you!

Has anyone who successfully gotten this to work with a shared disk image managed to then use the shared iPhoto library with Aperture on either or all of the accounts that share the library?

After much fiddling around where the second user I was trying to add using a photoshare group (second user does not have admin priveledges but that shouldn't matter) kept getting the permissions reverted back so they didn't have read/write anymore, I finally got it to work. But then I opened with Aperture with user #1 and it worked fine but when I tried Aperture with user #2 it went back to the same problem. For no explicit reason, the shared iPhoto library file had the photoshare group's permissiosn revert back to read only.

Any tips would be appreciated.

Mac OS X 10.8.3

iPhoto 9.4.3

Aperture 3.4.4

Thanks.

Would the method described here still work?

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/sharedlib.php

That article was last updated in 2004, or nine years ago - put another way, about 7 versions of iPhoto ago.

The OS has changed a lot since then and iPhoto is an entirely different application since then.

I have no idea if it would still work but there seem to be a lot of unnecssary steps involved. Essentially, itt seem to be the same process s using the Users/Shared folder and if so, it will be subject to the same limitations as described here in the thread.

Personally, I would not use information for a nine-year old version of the OS and the App.

Regards

TD

OK, I've tried Apple's method and can't get it to work, I am now trying Lukemacdonald's method, so far so good

We've really had no problems with the external drive since we started the thread. No missing pictures between shared users, no black screens with exclamation points, no noticeable difference in speed or access. It's not a particularly fast drive and wasn't anything special. Original advice was perfect; no complaints.

We're experiencing similar permission issues with a library stored in users/Shared as others have reported. It did work fine initially but as I've been adding photos my wife has just discovered that she can't access them.

I don't want to use an external HD per http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1198 because I have Time Capsule and I want Time Machine to back up my photos. If I create a disk image on my iMac HD, will Time Machine include it when backing up my iMac?

1, Time Machine will back up material on external disks. You just have to tell it to.

2. Using a Disk Image with TIme Machine means that any change to the Library gets the whole disk image backed up, adding to the time it takes to make backups.

Thanks Terrance. Is this still the best way to share 1 iPhoto library between 2 accounts on the same iMac plus have them backed up? I've had to have my iMac reformatted recently (it couldn't detect the volume) so I'm a bit paranoid about our photos. I also have 100GB on Dropbox - would that allow for read/write access if I share the folder?