Most of this ebook discusses sharing any type of files using file-sharing services. However, no ebook about sharing files on a Mac would be complete without explaining how to share iPhoto and iTunes libraries.
The first step in making iTunes share music is to decide whether to use the built-in iTunes sharing feature or to use file sharing. Here’s what you need to know about each:
iTunes has a built-in feature to share music which is easy to set up (see Use iTunes Built-in Sharing), but limited in a number of ways:
Music is available only when iTunes is running on the machine that is sharing the music. If you turn that machine off, it crashes, or someone needs all its processing power for Photoshop or other tasks, you can’t listen to its music.
This method does not work for sharing music among users of the same Macintosh.
A user’s repository of music is available to others only when her account is logged in and active. (In the case of Fast User Switching, a user could be logged in, but her account could be inactive.)
Because Apple is playing nice with the recording industry, all you can do with shared music is play it from within iTunes. You can’t add it to your own playlists, set ratings, or edit the tags that identify each MP3 file. That’s appropriate in some situations, but in cases where you’re sharing your own music among your own Macs, such as on a home network, it’s needlessly limiting and technologically overrules U.S. law and court decisions on fair use.
Apple added a restriction in March 2005 that only allows five other users to connect to your library within a 24-hour period. Boo, Apple, boo. This restriction prevents you from infringing on a song’s copyright, but in so doing eliminates some rights that you would have with physical media, like a CD, DVD, or VHS tape. If you have a large family or a number of computers at work and home that you use to listen to an iTunes library, you aren’t violating anyone’s copyright and yet you could run into problems with this restriction. Listening to music isn’t the same as stealing music.
iTunes sharing relies on Bonjour, a technology for automatically announcing network resources over a local network. But unlike Apple’s general use of Bonjour in which any resource is available to any other on the same physical network, iTunes restricts its sharing to machines on the same range of Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Even simple home networks could have two or more ranges of private or translated addresses, which eliminates iTunes sharing among users of them. (A typical scenario: a wired gateway and a wireless gateway feed out two different private network ranges.) A general-purpose file server has no such limitation, and might be appropriate for more complicated networks.
This approach involves storing your tunes in a central location, perhaps even a file server that doesn’t run iTunes. File sharing is harder to set up than the built-in iTunes sharing feature, but it is the only way to go if you want to share music among multiple accounts on the same Mac. It also works for sharing music across a network. (See Set Up a Shared Music Folder, later, to learn how to set up file sharing.)
Relying on a shared music folder has the advantage of letting people share the same music while still creating and maintaining their own playlists, since the playlist information stays with each user. On the downside, every time someone rips a new CD or purchases new music online, each user must import the songs manually by dragging them into iTunes. The silver lining in that cloud is that each user can pick and choose which of the shared albums to import.
If you decide that iTunes built-in sharing is the way to go, you can start sharing music by choosing Preferences from the iTunes menu (Command-,), clicking the Sharing button, and selecting Share My Music. As you can see in Figure 23, you may limit the shared music to specific playlists, change the name that appears in the playlist pane for everyone else on your network, and set a password.
On the playing side, there’s nothing new to do. Shared music appears automatically in the playlist pane in iTunes for all users on your local network; they play music by double-clicking a song just as they would normally in iTunes.
If you’ve decided to use the shared music folder approach, you’ll be happy to know that sharing music in iTunes is easy because iTunes is happy to load its music files from any location. Follow these steps:
If you have MP3 or AAC files in your
~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Musicfolder, copy youriTunes Musicfolder to the folder you want to use for shared music. Otherwise create a new folder in the desired location callediTunes Music.Tip
If you are using file sharing to share your music, put your iTunes Music folder on an AppleShare file server. Other types of file sharing should also work, although I’ve seen performance problems with Personal File Sharing in Mac OS 9 and earlier.
For sharing among users on the same Mac, either put it in the Shared folder or on a shared volume that’s always available. For more information on shared volumes, see Share Files on the Same Mac.
If you’re sharing your music via a file server, connect to the file server from each Mac on your network.
Perform Steps 3—6 for each user on each Mac:
Launch iTunes, choose Preferences from the iTunes menu (Command-,), and click the Advanced button.
Click the Change button next to the iTunes Music Folder Location field, and then navigate to and open your shared iTunes Music folder. Click OK to save your changes.
Make sure the two checkboxes for keeping your iTunes Music Folder organized and copying files to it are unchecked.
In the Finder, select all the songs in the shared iTunes Music folder and drag them into the iTunes window to import them.
Sharing photos in iPhoto is more complex than sharing music in iTunes because iPhoto is more particular about where its files live, and because all users need read-and-write access for importing and editing purposes. Sharing photos was particularly difficult until the release of iPhoto 4, which added Bonjour photo sharing that works exactly like the comparable feature in iTunes. iPhoto 5, released in January 2005, has identical support.
However, many people may not want to pay for iPhoto 5 (part of the iLife ’05 package and free with new Macs), and for others, iPhoto 4 and 5’s method of sharing files may not be ideal.
Note
You cannot share between iPhoto 2 and iPhoto 4 or 5; iPhoto 4 and 5 update your iPhoto Library folder the first time you launch it.
You must choose between two approaches to sharing photos in iPhoto: what I term the “shared iPhoto Library folder” approach, which works for iPhoto 2 or 4 or later, or the iPhoto Sharing approach, an option introduced in iPhoto 4 that does not work with iPhoto 2. Which should you choose?
Use the shared iPhoto Library folder approach to share photos among users on the same Mac or if you want to ensure that all networked users can import, view, organize, and output the same set of photos. The shared iPhoto Library method is best for people who want to mix all their photos and work on them together. It’s also the only option for people running iPhoto 2.
Use the iPhoto Sharing approach if you want multiple users on a network to be able to view each other’s photos and perform limited output. You can print shared photos, view them in a slideshow, send them to others in email, order prints of them from Apple, upload them to HomePage in your .Mac account, and use them as .Mac slides. However, you cannot add someone else’s shared photo to albums, edit it in any way, use it in iPhoto books, use it as your Desktop picture or for your screensaver, create an iDVD slideshow with it, or burn it to CD. To accomplish any of those tasks, you must first copy the shared photo to your Mac, after which it’s just like any other photo on your Mac. iPhoto Sharing is ideal for situations where each person in a family might have his or her own camera but wants to make some pictures available to the others, without allowing the others to edit them or mix them up.
Note
If you're wondering why I don’t mention iPhoto 3, the reason is that Apple skipped a version number for iPhoto and went from iPhoto 2 all the way up to iPhoto 4. The next version was dubbed iPhoto 5, however.
Tip
To use the shared iPhoto Library folder technique over a network, you’ll want at least a 100Base-T network, which runs at 100 Mbps (really 50–80 Mbps in the real world). Normal 10Base-T and AirPort (8 Mbps and 5 Mbps in the real world, respectively) will be frustrating to use; AirPort Extreme (25 Mbps of real throughput if you’re close to the base station) might work acceptably.
The iPhoto Sharing method of sharing photos over a network works better over relatively slow network connections, but even still, the faster your network, the easier it will be to work with shared photos.
You might think that you can use the same approach in iPhoto as with iTunes—putting the folder that contains your photos in a central location. In fact, you can, but, the /Users/Shared folder won’t work well; instead, the trick is to put the iPhoto Library folder on a shared volume (see Share Files on the Same Mac for information about how to set this up). Follow these steps to share photos among users of the same Mac:
Copy your
~/Pictures/iPhotoLibraryfolder to the shared volume, to a file server, or make sure other users can access it on your Mac via AppleShare. (If you’re using a shared volume, be sure to follow the steps in Share Files on the Same Mac to turn off permissions to the volume so all users can access the files.)For each user in turn, mount any network volumes as necessary, select the shared iPhoto Library folder, press Command-Option, and drag it to that user’s Pictures folder. When you drop the icon in the Pictures folder, the Finder creates an alias of the shared iPhoto Library folder. By default, iPhoto always looks for a folder called “iPhoto Library” in the Pictures folder, and it accepts an alias happily.
Verify that each user can import a photo and edit existing photos, and that every other user can see the results of those changes. After that, all users can use iPhoto with the shared iPhoto Library just as they would normally.
Tip
If you share an iPhoto Library folder over a network, avoid running iPhoto on multiple Macs at once to avoid confusion and crashes.
Note
Why can’t you use the /Users/Shared folder when sharing among users on the same Mac? The Shared folder doesn’t work well, because the permissions that iPhoto sets when one user imports new photos prevent other users from editing those photos. This was true even in iPhoto 2. iPhoto 4 and 5 seem to be both more uptight about permissions than iPhoto 2 and prone to crashing when those permissions aren’t right. Stick with a shared volume and you’ll be fine.
With iPhoto 4 or later, you can use Bonjour network sharing with photos, just as you can share music with iTunes. Unlike music in iTunes, though, everyone sharing photos presumably has permission to do so, so Apple lets you copy shared photos to your own Photo Library and output them in the many different ways iPhoto provides.
To start sharing photos, choose iPhoto > Preferences (Command-,), click Sharing, and select Share My Photos. You may limit the shared photos to specific albums, change the name that appears in the album pane for others on your network, and set a password (Figure 24).
If you have a firewall running when you check Share My Photos in Panther and iPhoto 4, iPhoto will balk because it requires a special port, number 8770, available for incoming traffic for others to connect to your copy of iPhoto (Figure 25). This warning appears to have disappeared in iPhoto 5 under Tiger: I was unable to trigger it even when the port was blocked.
In Jaguar and Panther, you must add a manual firewall exception (see the note on the next page to find out how). A checkbox for this option, just like the one for iTunes music sharing, never appeared in any Panther release. It was finally added in Tiger.
In Tiger, you can choose to enable or disable the firewall setting through these steps:
Open System Preferences and click the Sharing icon.
Click the Firewall tab in the Sharing preference pane.
Check or uncheck iPhoto Bonjour Sharing depending on whether you want to allow it to pass through the firewall (checked) or not (unchecked) (Figure 26).
Note
If you’re using Jaguar or Panther with iPhoto, you must add a manual firewall exclusion. Follow the steps back in Set Your Firewall for Sharing Files, and enter 8770 in the Port Number, Range, or Series field.
Shared photos appear in iPhoto as just another album, and you can view and output them in many of the ways you’re accustomed to with your own photos. If you want to edit a photo or use it in a way that iPhoto doesn’t allow with shared photos, you must first copy the photo by dragging it from the shared album to your Photo Library or one of your albums.