Managing a photo library with two users on two PCs?

January 9, 2011 6:22 AM

I've got a 65 Gb collection of photos on a NAS drive, and two users on two PCs. How do I manage it effectively?

Up to now, I've been using Picasa - which is great for tagging, face recognition and backup - but each user on each PC ends up with its own database, which means a tag would have to be added in 4 different places. Not good.

Is there a photo management solution that allows a photo to be tagged, face recognition etc. universally across both users on both PCs?

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

Do you want to do this locally? Uploading to Flickr (a pro account has unlimited uploading/storage) and managing the photos there can accomplish all of these things.

Is this a free/cheap solution you're looking for? Or would you be willing to buy software?
posted by jimmythefish at 7:12 AM on January 9, 2011

Have you seen this? (First Google result for "Picasa share 2 PCs)
posted by COD at 7:48 AM on January 9, 2011

The multiuser part of this is difficult. I'd recommend Adobe Lightroom but I don't think you can even share the metadata catalog on a NAS. There's ways to fake it out, but even then the lockfile means only one user at a time would be able to open Lightroom.
posted by Nelson at 7:49 AM on January 9, 2011

I tried for a long time to do something analogous (2 Macs, 2 users, 1 iPhoto library). In the end, I signed up for a paid Dropbox account, and now we sync a local copy of the photos and library between our machines. the performance issues from running from a network drive are gone, and we have built-in backups of our photos. the only thing we needed to train ourselves to do was (after closing th app) to let the changes files sync back to dropbox before putting the machine to sleep.

If you want a new software solution that supports this natively, you are into the realm of asset management software, which is designed for graphic designers etc. in an office environment on a network.
posted by misterbrandt at 9:36 AM on January 9, 2011