Q: Sharing an Aperture library

No, sorry, there is no way that is officially recommended by Apple, and Aperture Library needs to be on a local volume, not a remote network volume. Also Aperture is not designed as a shared multi-user database; see

     Aperture: Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library:http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3252

If you want work on your Aperture Library from two different Macs the safest way would be to move your Library to an external drive and to connect this drive into the mac you are currently working on.

Regards

Léonie

I am very confused by this, we always used Aperture 2 as a shared database on our network and several uses were able to access the database as long as each user had their own  unique Aperture serial number. So are you saying that they changed Aperture 3.0 to NOT be shareable by several users on a local network.  This could be a problem for our workflow.

Aperture has never been intended to allow use as a shared database. So no change there between version 2 and version 3.

Possibly you have been sharing a harddisc of photos but using separate local libraries on each mac?

I wonder if one of my tech guys did something like turn off permissions on that drive( partition) because we were certainly all accessing the same database. But he is no longer here so I do not know what he did to make that work. It seems strange that he was able to set up something that is supposedly not allowed by the program but like you say, it is probably not encouraged by the developer because it could expose the database to corruptions to it's integrity.

Does anyone know of another application that would allow multiple users?  Our basic need and the reason we chose Aperture was it's ability to set custom "tags" and use a radio button interface to tag all of our images so that others in the office could access a constantly updated database of images. I think I will look into the new features of Aperture, it seems that there may be a way to publish the images to an interface that others in the office can search by tags without actually accessing the database through the Aperture application.  It may be a plus if it is a web based interface so that we can work at home and still have access to our images. 

thanks guys

I recall there being users (here and/or in the Lightroom forums) asking about a multiuser, networked photo DAM application and don't think I ever read about one suggested by other users.

pvonk wrote:

I recall there being users (here and/or in the Lightroom forums) asking about a multiuser, networked photo DAM application and don't think I ever read about one suggested by other users.

These two are mentioned frequently:

- Extensis Portfolio

- Canto Cumulus

Also mentioned, usually, is that they are expensive.

evanluke wrote:

Our basic need and the reason we chose Aperture was it's ability to set custom "tags" and use a radio button interface to tag all of our images so that others in the office could access a constantly updated database of images.

Could you describe this more?  What was the "radio button interface"?  How many users tagged Images?  How many accessed the database?

Thanks.

I share an Aperture library between 2 users on the same computer. I recall that with Aperture 2, you could open the library even if there were permission issues. It would sometimes cause weird problems but you could open it. I used ACL (or something like that) to give both users access to the library but it was not a foolproof setup. Permissions always ended up getting messed up.

When Aperture 3 was released, I noticed Aperture would refuse to open a library that another user had opened. ACLs no longer worked. My fix for this was to enable "ignore ownership" for the volume that contained the library. You can only do this on a non-boot disk (i.e. additional disks inside a MacPro or an externally connected disk on any computer). I've been using Aperture 3 this way since it was released and it works perfectly until some system update causes that "ignore ownership" setting to be undone. It's happened a few times but is easy to fix.

Don't have enough knowledge about servers to know if you can "ignore ownership" on one and make Aperture 3 work. Having a library on a server is highly un-recommended. You will have issues.

Thanks Thomas. You have confirmed that I wasn't dreaming, that we were able to access the Aperture 2 database. But I fear your right that the same won't be possible in Apt3.  I was on a Lightroom forum today and they mentioned a Program called Media One Pro or something like that. I downloaded the demo to see if it will import from Aperture   It has a 5 seat license for $425. So that is actually cheaper than Aperture

I meant it was comparable to Aperture. I just keep forgetting how cheap it is now. I was one of those that paid $499 for Aperture 1 :)

Kirby, sorry I missed your question before , first I just noticed that I'm posting under both ImageFiction and evanluke. Not sure why .  Anyway. I may have called them

Radio buttons but that is probably not the right term. In Aperture 2. You could create custom tags ( for instance we catalog a lot of people shots to add into our architectural renderings , so we tag our people photos with words like woman/Asian/walking/towards/in sunlight   Then when we tag the images we just click on the appropriate buttons. No typing involved.    We need about 5 users to access the database. It would be nice if all could tag and ad photos but we could work around that.

If your need is to have a central repository of tagged pictures shared between many people, then you could use a web based image gallery. If you buy a QNAP or Synology NAS (others might have also this feature, check them) they provide a photo library tool. You just dumped the photo in a specific folder on the NAS (a NAS is a network hard disk by the way), the NAS indexes/discovers the new photos. It has a web interface, and you can use tagging.