Been searching around and have seen a lot of into on merging and workflow, but not direct sharing. Here is my situation –
Wife has iMac and with almost 40K pics in her iPhoto library (It is time to upgrade to Aperture obviously). I have a PC that I keep my DSLR library of about 20K Images.
So - I am thinking about purchasing me an iMac as well and then a copy of Aperture for each of us.
Problem - We simply need to be able to open each other libraries and access pictures/faces/places/events/etc. I dont want the complexity of having to export and merge each time - just be able to quickly search and pull up a photo.
Is this possible with Aperture3?
Thanks for the input - as I suspected this is not looking good. The libraries are way to big for dropbox and moving an external hard drive around is just no practical. She always wants access to her pics and I always want access to mine. Maybe doing an import on each machine once a month would get it….we would just have duplicated data on each machine.
I would have surly thought that they would have incorporated some level of sharing into the product - heck - Apple has always been on the leading edge of file sharing (I go all the way back to “localtalk” netwoks) so I am surprised by the lack of features.
Terry, I face the same problem sharing my library with my wife. We have a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro. I haven’t found a good way to share libraries between two computers unless they are very small. In that case you can sign up for a Dropbox account and put the library in your Dropbox folder. Then your libraries will sync through the cloud. You’ll need to be careful though to make sure the sync is complete after an editing session before logging off or sleeping and then also make sure the sync on the other machine is complete before opening Aperture. If you both access the library at the same time then there could be issues.
For now we’re sharing a library on the Mac Pro on a 2nd internal drive. (We have separate accounts). I’ve turned on “Ignore Ownership” in the Get Info window for the 2nd drive to avoid permissions problems. This should also work with an external drive. You still need to make sure Aperture is only running in one account if you have Fast User Switching turned on so that multiple accounts can be logged in at once.
You’d think that you could keep the library on a server but I tried accessing my library over the network (with Sharing turned on which is kinda like a server) and response was too slow to be usable.
Aperture is just not designed for multiple users.
Thomas
The best way that I have found to do this is by importing libraries. I have two libraries, one on my Macbook Pro and the other on my iMac. All of the images in the libraries are referenced masters so the Aperture libraries are pretty small. I also use very small previews (which helps to keep the library size down).
Once you do the initial sync, the incremental sync goes pretty quickly if you are just changing metadata and image adjustments. This is something that you have to play with and is unique to everyone’s setup and workflow.
Happy to help answer any more questions…
Yoni
Terry,
The best solution is the simplest—sneaker net. Just buy an FW hard drive (like a Drobo, always my favorite) and move it back and forth between computers as one person needs it. Granted a Drobo isn’t the easiest thing to move around; a smaller bus-powered drive would be easiest. I guess it depends on the size of your library and your willingness to do regular backups.
If your two computers are near each-other, then the the problem can be solved with a long FW cable. If they aren’t, then you’ll have to physically move the drive around.
Otherwise, the other solutions offered here are good, but carry risk. The dropbox solution has risk of library damage; the sync solution has risk of duplicate (or missing) photos.
Sorry there’s not a better solution for you.
@PhotoJoseph
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Not sure if this will help or not but I will share my workflow to a similar situation with my wife.
I use Aperture for 95% of my photos and iPhoto for the other %5. Snapshot style photos get imported into iPhoto and not Aperture. Since I am shooting weddings and stuff like that I need aperture to get that kind of stuff processed. My wife on the other hand wants simple, simple, simple! So I keep almost all of my photos in Aperture and process them there. I then make an album of just images that will be shared with iPhoto inside the aperture project. I will only make previews of those images as not to waste more space on the HD. I then open iPhoto and use its ability to look into Aperture’s library and I drag and drop the photos from that folder to iPhoto.
Couple rules that we play by.
1. I only do this for family photos. Pro/Work photos live in aperture.
2. ALL photos live on my Mac Pro. NO EXCEPTIONS! She can only access photos through iphoto once it connects to my MP. (This is so I can back up everything.)
3. Photos/Videos she takes all get imported into iPhoto, never into Aperture.
I know that might all seem harsh but it works great. Since, in the end, she only needs a handful of photos from me and a portion of her own photos there is no reason to split them among 2 different computers. I can back everything up and she only pulls what she needs.
Not sure that this will work for your situation but it might give you some ideas anyway.
Thanks everyone for your suggestions, this is great.
Terry — there are reasons I won’t go too in-depth into as to why Aperture doesn’t support sharing, but the easy answer is that if it shares a little, it has to share a lot. And that means massive organizations with hundreds or thousands of users will want to use Aperture as a tool to access a gargantuan shared library. Which sounds great, and is, but isn’t exactly easy to write in a way that works for everyone. I can’t say if this is something in progress or in discussion or not (and not because I know and won’t tell you—but because I honestly don’t know!) but I can guarantee that it’s something users have been asking for since Aperture 1.0—and Apple is aware of that desire.
@PhotoJoseph
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