Joseph and other Aperture Experts; do any of you have any experience sharing one Aperture library between two different Macs on the same local network? I have a massive 500GB worth of photos in a referenced 170GB Aperture library on my iMac and would like to share it with my wife who has her own Aperture on her MacBook. Is this even possible?
Thank you all for your ideas!
Jan,
Stay away from doing any library network sharing. Aperture wasn’t designed for it, and besides performance issues, if you went as far as separating the library from the masters (i.e. running Referenced) you could run into serious issues.
If you want to share a library, put it on an external hard drive and plug the drive into the computer you want to use it from. That’s really the only way to completely share the library.
If you just want to share the final images, then that’s much easier, and we can discuss ways to do that.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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Thank you very much Joseph. Sounds like a sound warning advice!;) Thank you
Don’t forget you’ll need to turn on “ignore ownership” on the external drive. Otherwise you and your wife will have problems opening the same library.
To turn it on, perform a Get Info command on the drive. Make sure you have the external drive icon itself selected and not its contents before doing this. In the Get Info window at the bottom in the permissions section, make sure “ignore ownership” is checked. You may need to twirl open this section and also click the lock icon and enter an administrator password.
If you ever have trouble accessing your library on the drive, verify the ignore ownership setting is still enabled. There are some system functions that seem to turn this setting off without warning. I haven’t figured out what they are but it happens periodically to me.
Thomas