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Garrett Murray lives here. He's the senior developer at Blue Flavor by day and an amateur writer and comedian by night. You can read more about him or
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Garrett Murray

Here's a short followup to what I wrote about using iTunes over AirDisk a while back.

I've gotten a few questions about how I dealt with the second computer in the equation (i.e., Katia's machine) once I had successfully moved everything on my laptop to the AirDisk. Here's what I did:

  • Opened iTunes on Katia's computer, changed the Music Location to the library on the AirDisk, quit iTunes
  • Copied the ~/Music/iTunes directory from my machine to Katia's
  • Opened iTunes

Now, this created an exact duplicate setup on Katia's computer that I have on mine. At least initially. Once she starts changing things, she can create her own playlists and it won't affect mine because iTunes stores this information locally. We're only sharing the actual content files on the server. But this is a good way to get both machines having the same data.

02-27-2007 @ 20:34

Unsurprisingly, using iPhoto over the network is completely useless. When you have 12,000+ photos (most of which are over 3MB in size), it's shocking that I would have even considered for a moment that I could store that data on a network and still have the same experience as using it locally. Well, experiment over, you can't.

Don't get me wrong, iPhoto still works, it just takes about 2 minutes to start up and about 4 to quit. And scrolling in the library is a constant beach ball affair.

However, the good news is that I don't really browse around in my old photos anyway after a while. I keep them because I want to have them forever, but I don't really need to look at them constantly. So, effectively, I'm using AirDisk as network storage only and I have a clean local library again.

When I start iPhoto, it uses my empty local library. If I want to browse the network photos, I hold down option when launching iPhoto and choose the network library (thanks for the tip, Shawn). When I want to import new photos, upload to Flickr, etc, I use the local library.

My only concern with this approach is what happens when I want to take photos from the local library and move them to the network library. I can't think of a good way other than copying them there and deleting them locally.

Maybe someone else has figured out a better way to do all of this. I can't be the only person who has a laptop and craploads of photos.

02-14-2007 @ 13:33