Best way for networked music & photos

[Pandamonium]

My wife and I have a MBP and a MB and I want a centralized music and photo solution. This is because I want redundant copies and because our SSDs don't have 100+GB to dedicate to our photo and music libraries.

Right now I run a Synology DS209, so I have their iTunes server software to stream music and I just keep photos in a network share. I'm looking into a more robust NAS (for ZFS support), and I might end up just getting an HP Microserver with OpenSolaris/Nexentastore/FreeBSD/FreeNAS.

The most important thing is our photos. I like how iPhoto arranges things by events for me. I want both of us to access the same library on the network. If we edit photos, I want the edited versions to remain alongside the originals on the network. I also want some way of copying "favorite" photos to our local libraries.

I want similar control over our music library. I rip all our CDs to Apple Lossless. I want the central storage to have the ALAC. Hell it could have ALAC and lossy AAC for all I care. I want to be able to sync songs/albums to the individual computer's iTunes libraries. IE: we have some ABBA some Journey CDs. My wife would probably want ABBA tracks and some Journey; I wouldn't want any ABBA but would want the Journey tracks. Regardless of who wants what on which machine, I want the full ALAC rips to reside on the centralized storage. Is there any software/appliance that does this? If not, I suppose we could manually copy what we want to our respective iTunes libraries.

I've been following the news on OS X Lion, and rumors have it that Lion may ship with Z-410, a ZFS-like filesystem for OS X. I already know that Lion integrates the server and regular OS in one install, but I'm curious to know if it may end up having the features I'm asking about.

 

[dmw16]

I am certainly no expert on this subject, but I'll at least throw out some questions and add my 2-cents.

I would think with everything you want to do, as long as the drive/directory that contains your data (music or pictures) shows up as a mounted drive then you should be able to point iTunes and iPhoto to use those as their default folders.

I have a Mac Mini Server (with OSX Server) on it and there is a way to sync home folders between the server and the client, but that probably isn't what you would want to do given SSD space contraints.

However, I believe that the server can house your home directory, but I am not sure how that is done as I am a novice and I partially bought the server to learn on. The downside to this would be your home directory wouldn't be accessible if you were off the network.

If you want to go the Mac Server route I picked mine up for $850 on Apple Refurb and I am thrilled with it.

 

[Pandamonium]

I might consider the mac server route if Lion ends up implementing Z-410. But that's all up in the air right now. Plus I don't really know what the Lion server features are- none of the Lion previews have delved into that.

 

[alent1234]

dump your pictures to the shutterfly cloud, problem solved

 

[Patranus]

Just point both copies of iPhoto to a iPhoto Library that is on a network share.

I believe you can hold down the 'option' key to select a new iPhoto library or use the utility iPhoto Library Manager.

You can do the same thing with iTunes.

 

[dmw16]

Just point both copies of iPhoto to a iPhoto Library that is on a network share.

I believe you can hold down the 'option' key to select a new iPhoto library or use the utility iPhoto Library Manager.

You can do the same thing with iTunes.

This is what I was trying to say in my convoluted post above

This seems like the simplest solution assuming you have solid network speeds within the home which really would be a must for any of these options.

 

[Pandamonium]

I've done some searching/reading about pointing the libraries to the network share. It seems that this would work, but if two users were simultaneously making changes to the same library (ie: my wife and I start to tag some photos), the libraries get corrupted because neither iTunes nor iPhoto was designed to handle multi-user environments. I guess I'm looking for some kind of application that serves the libraries to clients. Does that exist?

 

[dmw16]

I've done some searching/reading about pointing the libraries to the network share. It seems that this would work, but if two users were simultaneously making changes to the same library (ie: my wife and I start to tag some photos), the libraries get corrupted because neither iTunes nor iPhoto was designed to handle multi-user environments. I guess I'm looking for some kind of application that serves the libraries to clients. Does that exist?

Do you guys often mess in iPhoto at the same time but independent of each other within the range of your wifi network?

Anyway, is there a way for your computers to point to two separate iPhoto libraries that are then synced with a master once a day (or whatever interval you choose)? That would certainly require a server of some type tho.

 

[Pandamonium]

We don't simultaneously mess with iPhoto frequently, but I couldn't say that we would never do that. It seems like two simultaneous edits guarantees a corrupt iPhoto library and the only way to restore it is from a backup. With those kind of consequences, I'm wary of just pointing iPhoto at a shared library. I wish Apple would just develop multiuser-friendly versions of iPhoto and iTunes. It seems like enough households have multiple Macs now that the demand for this is sufficient to warrant product development.

 

[dmw16]

I didn't have time to read through these extensively, but do any of these help?

http://tech.kateva.org/2008/10/apple-supports-multi-user-iphoto.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1198
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050904072808460