The Mac Chronicles
iPhoto Sharing
OS X comes with iPhoto, a much better photo management application than anything we had on the old PC. iPhoto has a very intuitive interface; moving our photo library over was a trivial task. Furthermore, it immediately understood what to do with our camera as soon as we plugged in the USB.
However, by default, iPhoto imports pictures into the personal library of the user running iPhoto. This wasn’t the way we wanted iPhoto to work; rather, we wanted to share the same library, with full access control, no matter which account was in use.
The definitive and most workable approach to this problem uses a shared directory and access control lists, and is outlined at macOSXhints:
10.4: Share an iPhoto library among multiple users
Finally, to keep the ‘Pictures’ quickpick in the finder view looking normal, I followed the following tip, also from macOSXhints, to link each account’s iPhoto Library folder to the new shared folder:
Share an iPhoto4 Library between two or more users
This all works as desired. Each account sees the shared library and has full access control to it; iPhoto itself will disallow other instances of iPhoto to run under another account simultaneously, so data integrity is assured.
