sharing iTunes and iPhoto among multiple users

dcqdcq
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Hi all,



Just switched to Panther last night and set up our Mac for multiple users. Prior to Panther, logging out and back in took to long, so I never bothered. When My wife's iMac died this summer, she just began using our tower on the same desktop as me.



I was all excited about the switch, and then when we realized that when she's logged in, she can't listen to my iTunes (19GB worth) or see my iPhotos (1GB worth and growing fast). I know I could theoretically copy all the songs and photos over to her home folder, but that seems stupidly redundant to me. Plus I only have about 23 GBs left on my original HD, and I do quite a bit of video editing and that kind of space disappears quickly.



How can I share my songs and pictures with my wife on the same computer without duplicating them all? Is there some way to share (grant full read/write access to) one's music and pictures folders with other users on the same computer?



I do have another internal HD (120GB with about 100GB of space), which both accounts can access equally. I tried copying a few songs to that drive and seeing if her account would play them from that drive. But "add song to library" copied it to her home folder on the first HD, and "import" didn't work.



Please help.



Thanks a million.



DCQ

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    rogue27rogue27 Posts: 607member
    I have my iTunes music library located in /Library/Webserver/Documents/music



    This does two things.

    One, people connecting to my computer over the web (I have the webserver running) can see my music collection.



    Two, that folder is public readable to all users on the computer, so any logged in user can listen to music from that folder.





    All you have to do is move your iTunes music folder to into /Library/Webserver/ and in iTunes Preferences, click the advanced tab and select that folder for your music directory. Then for every other user account on the computer set the directory in the same place with the iTunes preferences.



    To keep iTunes libraries current, I only encode music with my account, and then every once in a while I drag the music folder onto iTunes in the other accounts so it will update the song listing.



    Also, all references to "Library" are referring to the library folder at the root level of the hard drive.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    For iPhoto in jaguar, move the iPhoto folder to a directory that both users can access (outside one another's home dir) and then make an alias to that directory with the same name as the normal iPhoto directory, in the place where it would normally be for each user.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Gizzmonic

    move the (...) folder to a directory that both users can access (outside one another's home dir) and then make an alias to that directory with the same name as the normal (...) directory, in the place where it would normally be for each user.



    thx. plain an' simple. i just was in order to ask a similar question regarding fileaccess between multible users...



    answered in advance;-)
  • Reply 4 of 4
    only one iTunes process can run on any Panther computer, regardless of other users



    so if you've logged in and started iTunes, then fast user switched to another user,



    that other user won't be able to access iTunes until your copy has quit

    (error message will inform them "a copy of iTunes is running for another user")



    otherwise, enjoy
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