Sharing iTunes/iPhoto libraries (NOT READ-ONLY)

[macgeek]

I'm not sure if I posted this in the right place, so sorry if it should be moved.

Here's my problem: My girlfriend and I are now living together and have consolidated our music and photos onto our new Mac Mini. This Mac Mini is plugged into my stereo and plasma. In addition to the Mac Mini, she has an iBook and I have a Powerbook. We use our notebooks for email, surfing, work/school stuff because it's a lot easier to use a laptop to surf the web than it is a Mac Mini connected to a plasma tv. The only problem is that, if we want to, say, buy a song from iTunes, we have to either use the Mac Mini or buy it on one of our notebooks, copy the file to the Mac Mini, and then import it into our iTunes Library. This is, to put it nicely, a pain in the arse. The same thing goes for photos. We take pictures, we have to hook the camera up to the Mac Mini and then import the photos and edit the iPhoto Library directly on the Mac Mini.

I would like a way to edit our iTunes and iPhoto libraries directly from our notebooks (without purchasing Apple Remote Desktop or using a crap VNC client/server setup). I thought about pointing our notebooks to use remote iTunes and iPhoto libraries (if we mounted the Mac Mini's drive on our machines), but I'm worried we may have some file contention issues and end up corrupting the library.

Anyone have any bright ideas? Thanks in advance...

 

[macgeek]

Any takers on this?

 

[eric2006]

I'd say that using the libraries directly - mounting the Mac Mini drive, then holding down the option key while starting iPhoto/iTunes to select the library on the Mini - would be best. The only thing that you might run into is if two people were editing the library at the same time, so only mount it when you need to add stuff, and use the sharing feature in iTunes and iPhoto to access the libraries otherwise. You might want to setup a wired connection for this, as it will probably be slow over wireless. A gigabit network would be the best, but the iBook may not have gigabit.
It's always a good idea to have backups of your libraries.

 

[macgeek]

Thanks for the tip. I didn't know about the option command. I'll give it a shot!