Help with centralising Photos on 3 iMacs

ukgeezer1

ukgeezer1

ukgeezer1

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Joined
5 Nov 2010
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118
Hi

I am a PC person trying to help my father In-law centralise his 25,000 photo collection. He has 3 iMacs of varying ages, most recently being the 27" Retina.
He uses aperture to manipulate and view the photos.

He has an airport Express and airport Extreme and a locally connected External USB hard drive to the Retina for Time Machine purposes.

He would like to have all 25,000 photos stored so all iMacs can view and edit the photos. I was suggesting a NAS type storage attached to the Extreme and keep his existing external HDD for occasion snap shots of the photos to store offsite.

Would a NAS be the way to go or would a simple USB 3.0 hard drive to the Extreme suffice or should the photos continue to be saved on the iMac retina internal 1tb drive and setup sharing somehow this way.

He has the funds for any solution but I don't want to "use a cannon to kill a mosquito"

Thanks in advance for any advice.
 
My father in-law was advised from the aperture support team that using the iCloud wouldn't be best solution, they would not be stored at the full resolution of the RAW format
 
A usb drive will work without too much trouble and appears to be the 'best' solution for when inevitably the imac gets updated. Just make sure that you have the pictures backed up somewhere in addition to the lonely usb drive.
 
Disk sharing via the AEBS is going to be the simplest solution, if you want to be able to access and edit the photos from any of the 3 machines, especially if you already have a spare disk around. This effectively will give you the same as you would have if using a proper NAS.

However, this will no doubt make image loading and editing feel more sluggish than it would if working locally on the iMac...

Does he need to access and edit photos from all 3 machines? Surely the 27" retina will be his go-to editing machine due to the screen?

I have 2x Mac's, originally I started out with a 21.5" iMac containing my aperture library, and then I bought a rMBP. I initially pointed my MBP at the photo library on my iMac so that I could work from a central library, but performance wasn't great. I also occasionally experienced permission corruptions, if for example the library was open on one machine and I tried to access it from another.

I now just work locally on my MBP, which is very responsive, and export the library from MBP and merge into my master library on my iMac every few months. Not an ideal workflow, but one that allows me to take advantage of the performance of my rMBP, but allowing me to access and edit photos from either machine if needed.
 
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