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l008com · Oct 28, 2003, 03:43 AM

I just got my friend to switch to an eMac from winblows. The computer has two users on it, one for him and one for this brother. I know they're going to want to have shared music when they find out that music on one's account isn't on the other. And I'm figuring they probably will want shared iPhoto libraries too. What are the easiest ways to accomplish this? I'm guessing doing something tricky with permissions and then making a bunch of aliases? or symlinks?

wataru · Oct 28, 2003, 03:55 AM

Uh, put the libraries in /Users/Shared? Then just tell iTunes where the library is in the prefs. For iPhoto you'll probably need to use aliases.

l008com · Oct 28, 2003, 01:38 PM

If I put the iPhoto folder in there as well, can I just make aliases to the default locations. Or will I need those Sym Links?

wataru · Oct 28, 2003, 01:42 PM

Originally posted by l008com:
If I put the iPhoto folder in there as well, can I just make aliases to the default locations. Or will I need those Sym Links?

I have no idea. You'll just have to try it.

Rickster · Oct 28, 2003, 02:35 PM

For iTunes to truly be shared, you'll need to share the iTunes Music Library file via an alias. If you just set both users' music folder location in their iTunes preferences, their music files will be kept in the same location, but they won't see music each other has added in iTunes. Unfortunately, by sharing the iTunes Music Library file, you'll also end up sharing the same set of playlists.

Here's how you do it:
1. Move your ~/Music/iTunes folder to a shared location (like /Users/Shared)
2. Make an alias pointing from ~/Music/iTunes to the new location of that folder.
3. Repeat step 2 for each user who wants to share the library.

For iPhoto, it's basically the same story... except you have to use a Unix-style symbolic link instead of an alias.

jcam · Oct 31, 2003, 09:51 AM

I want to do the same thing. I moved my i photo folder to the shared users folder and created an alias of it and placed it in my users folder, however, when I imported pics from my camera iPhoto created a new folder in my user photo and put the pics there. A bit confusing I know but not sure how to describe it very clearly. Am i doing anything wrong?

typoon · Oct 31, 2003, 10:49 AM

What I did for iPhoto is I gave all the users read/write permissions on it then it allows everyone on the machine to use the iphoto library. All they need to do then is to point there iPhoto in the prefs to that folder and it should work fine. I also use iPhoto buddy to setup different iPhoto libraries.

I'm sure you could probably do the samething with iTunes.

OAW · Oct 31, 2003, 11:16 AM

The only problem I've found with sharing iPhoto is in the area of permissions. Any new photos that are added are listed with the current user as the owner, so the other users can see them ... but if they try to edit them nothing happens. No error message. No nothing. I ended up writing an AppleScript that runs upon login that sets the permissions for all files in the iPhoto Library to be full access for everyone in order to get around this problem. One really shouldn't have to go through all that just to share an iPhoto library ... but it worked.

OAW

PS: This was with iPhoto under Jaguar. I'm not sure if Panther resolves any of the permissions issues when trying to do this.