Central library
One annoyance though is that each computer has it's own library locally, so when I add new pictures both libraries have to scan the watched folders. So I spent an hour hacking around to see if I can move the local database to a share on my home server.Symlinks
Picasa 3 keeps the image database in:
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| ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Picasa/db3/ |
I found the path after looking in the Preferences -> Network page. Now I moved in to a terminal window to;
- Create a PicasaDb on my home server
- Copy the local database to the folder on the share
- Rename my original database
- Create a symlink to the database now living on the server share
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| mkdir /Volumes/192.168.0.1/PicasaDb | |
| cp db3/** /Volumes/192.168.0.1/PicasaDb | |
| mv db3 db3old | |
| ln -s /Volumes/192.168.0.1/PicasaDb db3 |
With all this in place I fired up Picasa and it still worked, first hurdle over. I then edited an image and still no problems. I check the timestamps on the database files on the server and they had been updated plus, Picasa had not created a new database locally.
Next time I will attempt the same on the other computer to find out if Picasa will happily share a database.
5 comments:
Thanks a lot for this - exactly what I was looking for. I have a few macs linked together and want to share quite a large Picasa database.
But instead of moving the database to a separate server, I just created the symlink on computer B to the Picasa database on computer A.
But it seems you can't use picasa on both computers at the same time.
Need to work that part out.
Wonderful tip - I had to do things a bit differently as my wife's iMac is our 'server' and paths to the files would be different from her machine to mine. The files reside on the iMac (server) under /Users/her_account/shared/photos/ and the drive mounts to my MBP (client) under /Volumes/shared/photos/. Steps:
1) Follow the steps above on the Server, relocating the db to a share. I had to su and chmod 777 the files as well.
2) Create a symbolic link on the client installation of picasa to point the db3 on the share.
3) Create on the client the same directory structure /Users/her_account/Documents and then a symbolic link to "shared: which points to the /Volumes/shared on the client. My guess is the picasa db on the server (where the inital picasa db was created) looks for the files in /Users/her_account/Documents/.... and so that structure has to be emulated on the client. It worked for me anyway.
I can run picasa on either machine, and everything crosses over. It's even quite fast (802.11n)
wonderful tips. I have both Mac and Windows. It looks like the Windows version and Mac version have different database format. Don't know if anyone know how to make Windows & Mac share the same picasa database?
hey! i'm also interested in an mac and windows solution - any comments?
looking forward for a windows and mac solution also
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