MacOnMacs: iPhoto '06 - Fixing Permissions & Sharing

I recently installed iLife '06, which has some great improvements but still has some bugs that I hope are addressed soon. One thing that I know a lot of people have faced after installing iPhoto 6, launching it for the first time, and then starting the requisite library update, is a message telling you to repair permissions on your iPhoto Library folder (and its contents) due to a lack of proper permissions. Here is a quick way to do this:

1. In the Finder, select your iPhoto Library folder (usually in the Pictures directory in your home folder) and press command/apple-i (File->Get Info);
   
2. From the resultant popup, open the "Ownership & Permissions" section and the "Details" section therein;
   
3. Make sure that you're either...
   • the Owner and the owner's Access is set to "Read & Write" OR
     
   • a member of the correct Group and that that group's Access is set to "Read & Write" (see more about this below)
4. After you've verified that the iPhoto Library has the proper permissions (as detailed in the last point), click "Apply to enclosed items";
   
5. Relaunch iPhoto and, god willing, you will be able to now do the upgrade without further problems!

Another issue that is ongoing with iPhoto is having multiple users on the same machine be able to share and edit the same iPhoto library. Maybe there are some welcome changes in iPhoto '06 to address this, but I don't think so (at least not to be able to edit photos as well as view them). Here is one (of several) way to do this:
NOTE: There is one step in the process I outline below that is a little technical, and that's creating a new group. I won't go into too much detail on this now but I'll tell you where to start off.
WARNING: Make a backup of your iPhoto library in case of unexpected results.

1. In the Finder, select your iPhoto Library folder and move it to Macintosh HD/Users/Shared;
   
2. Select your newly relocated iPhoto Library folder and right-click->Make Alias (or File->Make Alias);
   
3. Move this alias to the Pictures folder in your home folder and then remove the " alias" part of the name so that the alias file itself is now named simply "iPhoto Library" (repeat this step for the other users on your computer);
   
4. At this point you should be able to open iPhoto (and, if necessary, select the above alias as your library) and it will follow the alias to the Shared folder to see the library contents. One problem - all the users may not have permission to modify the files in the library;
   
5. One solution to this is to create a new group (I call mine "sharedUser"), which you can do through the Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager app;
   
6. This is the part I don't want to get too deep into b/c you need to have some idea of what you're doing here (if you're not sure then research this online a bit first). In a nutshell, highlight "groups" (probably in the second column) and click the "New" icon in the upper left corner (you may have to click on the lock at the bottom of this window to make changes). Here is the "Property" - "Value" pairs I used...
   • gid - 201
     
   • name - sharedUser
     
   • password - *
     
   • users - (username1, username2, username3), which should open to show "Value(s)" of...
     • username1
       
     • username2
       
     • username3
7. Now that you have a new Group including everyone you want to share your library with, we're going to go through the process we did in my first tip. In the Finder, select Macintosh HD/Users/Shared/iPhoto Library and hit command-i (File->Get Info);
   
8. Under "Ownership & Permissions"->"Details", select your new Group from the pulldown (in my case, "sharedUser") and set its Access to "Read & Write";
   
9. Now, with your access properly set to allow for any users in that group to both read (view) and write (edit) the iPhoto Library folder in the Shared directory, be sure to click "Apply to enclosed items" to make these changes to ALL the files in this folder.

Not exactly a simple process, and I really think Apple needs to work on a way to make this kind of stuff easier. I tried making an Automator script that would do this, but I couldn't find all the settings I needed in there - if you know of a way to use Automator to change permissions then please let me know.

Hope that helps to make your move to iPhoto 6 (with its intriguing Photocasting feature) a little simpler! I'll be putting some more posts up here as I get more familiar with the new iLife '06 apps.