“iPhoto comes with a single library per Mac user. If everyone in your household uses the same user account, that means one iPhoto library that collects everything from everyone’s cameras or iPhones,” Kayhill explains. “Knowledge is power. First, there’s a simple, elegant, Mac-like, typical Apple way to create multiple iPhoto libraries. Press the Option key while clicking the iPhoto icon in the Dock (or by double-clicking the iPhoto icon in the Applications folder).”
Kayhill reports, “What you get is a pop up dialog box. Click to Create a new iPhoto library (which is safely stored next to your default library), or click Choose to select a library, or click Other Library to look elsewhere for an iPhoto library.”
Full article, with 3 more ways to have multiple iPhoto photo libraries, here.
The method the author describes also allows you to select the library to view on launch.
I have used iPhoto Buddy for years. It makes having and managing multiple iPhoto libraries really easy.
While the article cited above says that it is free, it is donation-ware, but worth the donation. The author has not only provided upgrades as iPhoto has evolved, but is very responsive to any support questions you might have.
What I want is the opposite. I have five accounts on all my Macs. They are all my family members, and they all want access to the same iPhoto library.
Up until iLife 11, I was able to put that main library into the ‘Shared’ user folder and manually change permissions to allow every user read & write permissions. Unfortunately, iLife 11 changed something, so this no longer works quite right. Apparently, only ONE user (the original owner) of the iPhoto Library is actually allowed to make changes. So, if I open iPhoto from a non-owning user and insert a SD(HC) card with new pictures on it, the import of pictures will seemingly go fine, but once I quit iPhoto, all new pictures will be gone.
This is colossally annoying, as my wife imports pictures pretty much as often as me, and she no longer can do it (other than switching to my own profile, which she refuses to do, out of respect for personal privacy).
@Predrag:
Have you found a good way to sync multiple iPhoto libraries from multiple Macs? My wife has many photos on her MacBook, and I have our main iPhoto library on my iMac. I want to sync them, but we have many more duplicates than separate photos, and I really don’t want to have to do it manually (thus, it has not been done).
Multiple libraries in iPhoto are great. Some photos of the wife you don’t want the kids to see!!
I wish they had the same in Address Book.
Another annoying thing is that when I insert an SD(HC) card into the computer, iPhoto is automatically launched on EVERY profile that is currently logged in. I always use fast user switching (priceless), and at least two users (my wife and myself) are logged in at all times on all of my Macs. Because I use one single shared iPhoto library, if iPhoto is launched twice (by two different users), the second instance will (expectedly) report an error (library file locked), and will shut down iPhoto upon dismissing of the error message. This is fine (only one person can open any single file at a time). However, the most annoying part of this is, upon insertion of SD card, iPhoto will, for some reason, always first open under a user ID that is not currently on screen. By the time iPhoto launches on my currently open desktop, the user running in the background will have already locked the iPhoto Library and my active user iPhoto instance will shut down. Then, I have to switch to the background user(s), terminate iPhoto one by one, come back to my own user session, manually launch iPhoto again and import images.
Apple really needs to figure out how to make single iPhoto and iTunes libraries available to all users on a Mac. At least with iTunes, I don’t have similar problems — it just works.
bizlaw:
I had searched high and low, and several tools that claimed to do it didn’t actually do it consistently and reliably. I always ended up with way too many duplicated I cared to weed out manually. I have exactly the same problem and my only solution is to keep reminding everyone to import images to all Macs. I’m sure, though, there are definitely SOME pictures that haven’t made it to all our machines, because someone forgot to import on all of them.
…”Some photos of the wife you don’t want the kids to see!”
I keep those outside of iPhoto, zipped up under a password. There aren’t that many of them, so I don’t really need an iPhoto-type of tool to manage them…
…”Some photos of the wife you don’t want the kids to see!”
I have a separate Mac for that…
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Wasn’t everyone dissing this author the other day for another one of her posts and the fact that she is a self described mommy?
@qka… Alexis has been with Mac360 for a very long time. No one should be dissing her who has followed her writings over the years. Mac360 has a different flavor than some other Mac sites. I admit that I used to read it more than now though. Not enough time anymore. It’s been a good Mac site and I see MDN is quoting from it more and more recently.
For those wanting synced libraries:
Try haystacksoftware.com creators of the excellent iPhoto sync and even excellenter Arq.
Hah! It works with iTunes, too! Just tried it.
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LOL…
Seems like a simple enough feature Apple should just a 1 line of code in an update to fix it?