iPhoto is a great Mac app. You can’t beat the price. What if you have more than one Mac? Where do you keep your iPhoto library? On both Macs?
How do you keep photos synchronized between each Mac? The way Apple structures iPhoto means that syncs between Macs are not easy. What you need is a quick and easy Mac app that syncs your photos with a click.
Living In The Age Of Multiple Macs
The problem is simple. You have more than one Mac and you have iPhoto on each. What’s the best way to keep the iPhoto libraries in sync?
First, photo synchronization makes for a good backup of cherished photos and videos.
Second, it’s convenient to have all your iPhoto libraries on each Mac.
Finally, the sync method needs to be simple, straightforward, foolproof, and inexpensive.
Apple’s iPhoto library is like a giant locked folder of photos. iPhoto puts them inside, but synchronizing iPhoto libraries is painful. Fortunately, that’s what iPhotoSync does.
Sync Me, Baby, One More Time
iPhotoSync is a straightforward app that lives to do one thing. Sync photos between your Macs. That means you run iPhotoSync on each Mac. The control panel displays which photos and videos are on which Mac.
iPhotoSync takes a unique approach to moving photos from one Mac to another. In Manual Mode, photos are copied from your Mac to the other Mac and placed in that Mac’s iPhoto library Auto Import folder.
When that Mac’s iPhoto starts up, the photos are imported. That makes the process safer because Apple doesn’t provide an easy way to synchronize photos and videos between multiple iPhoto libraries.
iPhotoSync also has an Automatic Mode so you can sync photos and videos between Macs without having to review the photos first.
It’s easy to copy photos from one Mac to another, back and forth, or sync between the two Macs. You get to view all the photos from any album in iPhoto.
What I like about iPhotoSync is that it only retrieves original photos and videos and never deletes anything from the iPhoto library.
And, it never overwrites any editing or modifications you’ve made to a photo.
That’s both good and bad. It’s good because it’s safe.
It’s bad because edits and mods on one Mac don’t transfer over to the other Mac (thanks to Apple), and there’s not an easy way around that issue.
For me, it was best to set up one Mac as the central iPhoto server, upload all photos to that Mac, and have iPhotoSync copy them to other Macs in the household, keeping all edits and mods on one Mac.
Simple, easy, straightforward, no damage, and it makes for a great backup. Now, if there was only some way to make a perfect, one-click sync of iPhoto libraries between Macs than includes all modifications.
About Ron McElfresh
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