Using ACLs to Share iPhoto and iTunes Libraries

Posted May 3rd, 2006
Related entries: Mac

In this article over at Trent Davie’s ad Hominem blog he discusses an elegant solution to the whole notion of sharing an iPhoto library amongst several users on the same Mac.

My wife and I have this problem. We certainly don’t have our own sets of photos, but we do manage our own accounts. The old way was to wrap iPhoto in a bourne shell script that set the umask before each execution, maintaining group permissions. This works fine, but has the significant downside of having to be rebuilt every time a new iPhoto update comes down.

I’ll be trying out this solution to see if it works better for us. It also mentions in the comment trail that a similar approach could solve the problem for iTunes. What I really want though is for each account to share the same music library (the songs themselves), but maintain different ratings and playlists for each account. I’ve seen nothing that will do that for me yet however.

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One Response to “Using ACLs to Share iPhoto and iTunes Libraries”

  1. Reid Says:
    January 15th, 2007 at 12:52 pm

    Have you tried playing around with group ownership of the libraries?

    I added myself to my wife’s group and ensured her group had read access to at least her iTunes directories. I then added her library to mine with the preference to copy unchecked (iTunes -> Preferences… -> Advanced -> “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to Library”).

    I did not double-check that the files were not simply copied over. Nor do I know if it maintains separate ratings (though I imagine it does as it maintanis separate playlists). It did however make her work ripping our CDs available to me… which was my whole goal.

    If it works for you, it would be simply to add your wife to your group and check the appropriate permissions.

    Let me know how it works for you or if you already solved the problem a different way.