Best (OS X) solution for remote photo editing?

March 12, 2010 7:04 AM

What's the best way to set things up so my wife can edit our iPhoto library (currently on the iMac) from a new MacBook that I plan to buy?

I have an iMac (24", 2.8GHz, OS 10.5.8). All of the family photos are in iPhoto, stored locally on the iMac's internal drive. I have an external USB2 drive for Time Machine backups and I use Backblaze for remote backups. I'd like to get my wife a MacBook Pro. Besides couch surfing and the occasional trip out of town, a primary use of it will be for her to edit the photos w/o being chained to my desk.

What's the best way to set that up? A networked hard drive would be nice, but Backblaze won't back up networked volumes. It's limited to internal drives and drives attached (FireWire or USB) to the same machine. And I don't want to give that up, because I sleep better at night knowing everything is backed up to two places, one offsite.

I have WiFi (WRT-54G) running and wireless printing + music (AirPort Express). I'm assuming there's some way to share the iPhoto library or, barring that, some way (like LogMeIn, which I use to hit my iMac remotely) of granting remote access to the iMac. Any tips on exactly how much MacBook I need to make this a pleasant experience will also be appreciated.

posted by wheat to computers & internet (4 answers total)

If you just want remote desktop, snow leopard has screen sharing built in, and is super easy to use. Can't go fullscreen, which is annoying, but is fast enough to do pretty much everything with "adaptive quality"on.
posted by CharlesV42 at 7:31 AM on March 12, 2010

I think screen sharing will be too laggy for photo editing.

Why not just share the drive over the network rather than remove it from the iMac completely?

Otherwise, Dropbox, which also backs up offsite at the same time as sharing between multiple machines (referral link that gives you extra space).

Is it not possible to make Backblaze think a networked drive is local or to just rsync from the networked drive to a local location?
posted by turkeyphant at 8:44 AM on March 12, 2010

CharlesV42, does Snow Leopard's screen sharing work with Mac's running Leopard? I have some audio hardware that is, for now, keeping me from being able to upgrade to Snow Leopard on the iMac.

turkeyphant, there's no way that I know of toe trick Backblaze into seeing a networked drive as local. Rsync is a possibility (or would be, if I had a networked drive, which I currently don't). I use Dropbox myself for a few things, but what I really want is to give her access to the entire library, rather than having to shuttle files to her machine, edit, and then shuttle back. And, to be honest, I've lost a few things via weird Dropbox syncing. So I don't much trust it for important files.

Sharing the drive might be just the thing. I've never set that up before, but I could try it out.
posted by wheat at 9:52 AM on March 12, 2010

I'm running 10.5 and have controlled the screen of a machine running 10.6, so I imagine it would work the other way as well. But I'd say sharing the drive is your best bet, too.
posted by dmo at 5:34 AM on March 13, 2010