More Mac woes. I just want to have my iPhoto library shared. Should be possible. People act as if it's possible - even the book iPhoto: the Missing Manual (which I leafed through at a bookstore once) says that it's possible. Unfortunately, I've tried it. It's just not possible in any elegant way. The good people at macosxhints.com have a hint about this, which is also incorrect in stating that it's possible to get this to work. As the comments already pointed out, it's not possible.
Besides the reasons mentioned in that hint page, iPhoto's AlbumData.xml file keeps getting it's owning group modified, which is a problem for me, since I'd like to have every file be a group containing me and my wife. Strangely enough, it gets set to the "wheel" group. This is odd, since I don't think that the iPhoto process is running as that group, and the parent directory of AlbumData.xml has the group permission I'm aiming for.
So I ended up doing what someone else had already had to resort to - just running a scheduled service to modify all the permissions to the way I like them. It's ugly. But it will hopefully work.
Posted by ahyatt at December 28, 2003 10:51 PMCouldn't you just add you and your wife to the wheel group? I'm no Mac expert (just switched about 4 months ago) but seems logical to me from a unix standpoint.
Posted by: John Cook on January 10, 2004 11:41 AMYes, it's logical, and yes, it would work. It just not the elegant "real" solution that I would prefer. That would only be part of the problem, though. The other part is that new photos are created with the wrong permissions. I haven't seen this firsthand, but it's described in the linked page from macosxhints.
Well, there is one other thing you could do. You could write an AppleScript that launches iPhoto. Then when you close iPhoto, the script could hit your photo library and fix the permissions. Just plop this in your dock instead of iPhoto.
It's not super-elegant, but in my mind it's cleaner than the cron job.
Posted by: John Cook on January 11, 2004 10:03 AMThat's a good idea! Thanks for the tip.
Posted by: Andrew Hyatt on January 12, 2004 09:34 AM