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panjandrum

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 22, 2009
749
940
United States
I'm looking for recommendations for good, Mac-like, easy-to-use replacements for Photos and iMovie that don't use Libraries for storage.

Long story short; the once-unassailable Apple Education ecosystem was long-ago broken by Apple themselves. One of the things they broke was the ability to house the libraries for library-based applications such as iPhoto on network drives. (This was broken in Apple's pursuit of the 1:1 push, which, as a Montessori school, we do not need. If we eventually get there it will only be as the incidental by-product of us keeping our technology functional as long as humanly possible.)

I got around this by creating encrypted disk-images on shared volumes (i.e. as far as Photos and iMovie are concerned a student's Photos and iMovie libraries are on local media, even though the student has mounted a password-protected sparseimage housed on a shared volume and manually opened their specific libraries that way).

But this is proving to be too much as a burden on the younger students. Next year I would like to install some really decent movie-editing and photo-editing apps that our students can use on the Macs without having to worry about where their libraries are. The ideal situation would be students simply being able to keep a folder of pics and movie files that they wish to work with.

These don't need to be free (but do need to be sold through Apple's education distribution channel), but I would like products that are reasonably 'mac-like' and easy to use. Pixelmator, for example, is a great product but it might be a bit too complicated for younger students.

Any suggestions?
 
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