Sharing iPhoto library

[Trix10]

Hey all, i have iPhoto on my Mac with a large amount of photos imported (family photos), edited etc etc. My partner has a mac too, and she has her own library with say 60 odd photos on it and thats all (Mainly from photo stream).

She would like to have all these photos too, so I want to copy a version of my photo library and put it onto her a computer, and then import it into iPhoto so that she has a copy of my photo library.

How do i go about doing this, so that she doesn't lose all the photos she currently has, but ends up with the combined photo libraries, so hers plus mine.

Thank you!

 

[aarond12]

The best way I know of, which unfortunately loses any edits, rotations, crops, etc., is to:

* Go to the Finder
* Navigate to your Pictures folder and find the iPhoto Library
* Right-click (or Control-click) on the iPhoto Library and select Show Contents
* Navigate to the Originals folder and copy that to the other computer (via network, thumb drive, etc.)
* On the other computer, start iPhoto
* Drag the Originals folder into iPhoto

 

[RedCroissant]

I would go a different way.
1. Have her remove her files from her iPhoto library to the desktop.
2. Then once her iPhoto library is empty, rename it to iPhoto library.old.
3. Then click and drag your iPhoto library to an external drive and then transfer it to her computer.
4. Once she opens iPhoto, it will asks her which library to sync to and then she can choose your library that she just copied.
5. After that, she just needs to drag her original photos into the new library and everything should be the way it is on your computer as well.
6. Then have her delete the iPhoto library.old file and then no issues.

Another thing to consider is to just get an external hard drive connoted to a wireless router and share it over your network. Then point your iPhoto to that location and then you can both have all the pictures accessible without having to clog up your hard drives.

 

[robgendreau]

Couple of things.

First, with iPhoto 9.3 you can now open other iPhoto libraries without quitting the applications and restarting, if that meets your needs.

Second, try iPhoto Library Manager. It's worth the $20 to use it to merge libraries, and it has some other features as well. Since with PhotoStream it's likely your two disparate libraries will soon go out of synch again, you may find it to be a good long range solution. You could cobble together a work-around after using RedCroissant's excellent solution (essentially always using the same library) but it would be a bit risky if you both accessed it at the same time.

Rob

 

[RedCroissant]

Couple of things.

First, with iPhoto 9.3 you can now open other iPhoto libraries without quitting the applications and restarting, if that meets your needs.

Second, try iPhoto Library Manager. It's worth the $20 to use it to merge libraries, and it has some other features as well. Since with PhotoStream it's likely your two disparate libraries will soon go out of synch again, you may find it to be a good long range solution. You could cobble together a work-around after using RedCroissant's excellent solution (essentially always using the same library) but it would be a bit risky if you both accessed it at the same time.

Rob

Even though having one library on an external with both your iPhoto apps assigned to that locations seems like the way to go for me, I didn't even consider the effects of both of you reading/writing to the library at the same time. If you do decide to go that way, follow the steps of renaming your library(but don't delete it) and then test it out. Otherwise, still do the reassigning iPhoto library choice and then when you import photos, just make sure the second one that imports the photos deletes them from whatever disc you used.

And wow, that sentence structure totally sucked. I apologize for that, but as you can see, I am too lazy to go and fix it now because I am committed to posting this. Have fun!