Mac software

Resolving riddles and restrictions with what you want to run on your Mac

Sharing the family Photos album

QI’m about to start scanning thousands of old family photos, and want to put them in a Photos library to share over our home network. Will that work?

AThis is an excellent time to get this done, given the diminishing supply of and support for scanners. There are good tools for enhancing and retouching scanned images, but sharing them over a network is more of a problem.

So long as you’re working with thousands not hundreds of thousands of images, Photos is a natural first choice, but it isn’t designed to work with networked libraries. The other alternative, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, is even more stringent, and doesn’t work with networked libraries at all, only local ones. The next step up is a content management system, which is designed to be networked, but is considerably more expensive and complex.

The danger with Photos Libraries is that two or more users could simultaneously modify their contents, something that the Photos app isn’t designed to handle, and may give unpredictable results. Provided that only one user makes changes at a time, and others just browse, it can work, though.

You can make this easier, and solve issues of library size, by storing images in more than one library. Photos can only open one at a time (see bit.ly/mac364photosmove). You could share images using iCloud Photos, which is designed for multiple users, but that isn’t efficient when the users are on a single local network, and can cost a lot in storage.

When building large collections of images, it’s often best to divide them across several Photos libraries to limit their size.