I would like to make an exact 1:1 copy of my photos folder to my network drive (so my wife can access the photos on her dell). Also it would be nice if it could sync the folders, mine being the master version.
You can just drag and drop to a mounted network drive from ~/Pictures
rsync is a command line folder syncing tool you can use. I couldn't begin to explain how to use it over a network drive, but there should be some tutorials out there for it.
As an alternatively you could get a mobile.me subscription and your wive and you could use that to share your entire picture library
You know I discovered Automator, created a workflow then saved as a iCal plugin schedule to run once a week. On her machine I pointed MS photo live to the shared folder.