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9.5. Photo Sharing Across AccountsMac OS X is designed from the ground up to be a multiple- user operating system. You can set up Mac OS X with individual user accounts so that everyone must log in. When the Mac starts up, in other words, you have to click your account name and type a password before you can start using it. Upon doing so, you discover the Macintosh universe just as you left it, including your icons on the desktop, Dock configuration, desktop picture, screen saver, Web browser bookmarks, email account, fonts, startup programs, and so on. This accounts feature adds both convenience (people don't have to wade through other people's stuff) and security (people can't wade through other people's stuff). As you can imagine, this feature is a big deal in schools , businesses, and families. This feature also means that each account holder has a separate iPhoto Library folder. (Remember, it lives inside your own Home folder.) The photos you import into iPhoto are accessible only to you, not to anyone else who might log in. If you and your spouse each log into Mac OS X with a different account, you each get your own Photo Library ”and neither of you has access to the other's pictures in iPhoto. But what if the two of you want to share the same photos? Ordinarily, you'd be stuck, since iPhoto can't make its library available to more than a single user. There are three relatively easy solutions to this common conundrum . 9.5.1. Easiest: Share Your LibraryiPhoto's sharing feature, as described on the previous pages, isn't just useful for sharing photos across the network. It's equally good at sharing photos between accounts on the same Mac. To make this work, you have to set up two things. First, iPhoto has to be running in the account that will be sharing the pictures. Second, you have to turn on Fast User Switching. (To find this checkbox, open the Accounts panel of System Preferences. Click the Login Options button.) Now you're ready. Log in as, say, Dad. Share some albums. Now Mom chooses her name from the little Fast User Switching menu at the upper-right corner of the screen, thereby switching to her own account (and shoving Dad's to the background). She'll find that Dad's albums show up in her copy of iPhoto, exactly as shown in Figure 9-17. She can copy whichever pictures she likes into her own albums. Tip: Of course, you can also share the contents of a Photo Library by burning an iPhoto CD, as described on page 337. Once you've put your Photo Library on CD using the Burn command, any account holder ”on your own Mac or any other ”can open and view it within iPhoto. Other people can copy individual photos or whole albums from your CD to their own Photo Libraries. 9.5.2. Geekiest: Move the LibraryThe problem with the Share Your Library method is that you wind up with copies of the pictures. In some situations, you may want to work on exactly the same set of pictures. You want, in other words, to share the same iPhoto Library. What will trip up any normal person's attempt to share an iPhoto Library is a little thing called permissions. That term refers to the insanely complex web of invisible Unix codes that keep your files and folders out of the hands of other account holders, and vice versa. The trick here, then, is to perform a two-step maneuver (one of which requires the assistance of a piece of free software). First, put your photo library somewhere where every account holder has access to it. Second, change its permissions from "mine" to "everyone's." Here's the drill:
Better yet, each family member (account holder) can set things up the same way for themselves , by repeating steps 2 through 5. (Only one person can actually have the library open for editing at a time, though.) |
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