I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, but another option that is available to you (and not restricted to iPhoto 4 users) is myPhoto (which allows you to share your photos as a web site automagically).

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and i'll toot his horn for him - myPhoto is an excellent product (and free, too) that keeps your entire iPhoto Library (or just the parts you want) live all the time. really nice stuff, and doesn't interfere with iPhoto's normal operations in any way. very slick!

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Toot Toot!!!, myPhoto is great although I see the benefits of the other hint as well, but to make a .mac like interface of your iPhoto album is great!

---
The box said, Windows 95 or better, so I bought OS X.

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Please don't blow your own horn...When you install MyPhoto it moves your iPhoto Library into the MyPhoto folder and replaces it with an alias...So if you just drag the MyPhoto folder into the trash and click empty...ALL YOUR PHOTOS ARE DELETED, WHICH IS WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO ME...so please, don't blow your own horn. Now I have several days of work to do putting all my photos back in iPhoto, editing, cropping, fixing.....

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As I've explained to you via email, myPhoto moves the iPhoto Library to your sites folder because iPhoto can handle aliases fine and by default, Apache can't. There are customizations you can make to Apache to get around this, but for some reason, I have not had consistent results in terms of reliability with all of my users and since most users don't want to customize Apache themselves if something goes wrong, this is a big burden in terms of support and a big hassle for the average user (who doesn't want to know of something like Terminal.app).

Aware of the oddities in my install, I have therefore provided written documentation on how to uninstall the files (very detailed, see the read me) as well as an uninstall option provided through the installer. Plenty of users who have had to uninstall myPhoto for some reason or another have done so just fine without data loss and so I think it is unfair of you to shift all blame in this incident upon myPhoto. I apologize for this incident and I sympathize with your frustration, but at the same time, I cannot accept the blame for your misfortune. If you'd like to discuss this further, please feel free to email me about this.

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"Aware of the oddities in my install" says it all! Moving an iPhoto library from the place Apple intended to be instead of using the features of the Apache webserver that would do the job is an oddity and leads to problems. Whether you accept the blame or not, my photos did not survive your oddities, but they would have survived using Apache correctly. I would never have dragged my iPhoto library to the trash can. I drag an app to the trash can all the time without suffering data loss.

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My my, I have opened a can of worms.
I have tried myPhoto but had lots of problems installing and managing it, especially if (like mine) the iPhoto Library lies on another partition. This hint is fairly straightforward and, apart from the initial setup in Network Beacon, fairly un-geeklike.

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I have found myPhoto to require a bit of attention to the details of the install and that the 10.3 install only required knowing that I should edit the httpd.conf file (/private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf) with BBEdit (I am not the type to want to know vi or pico in the Terminal). BBEdit is very useful because it respects all privs on files and doesn't change creator types. I have found that using SymbolicLinker (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17655) again because ln -s in Terminal is a pain. Simply, if you use symbolic links for the iPhoto Library to point to the new location in /Library/Webserver/Documents/myPhoto/iPhoto Library/ then all is well and nothing remotely close to data loss occurs and all sharing (Rendezvous and myPhoto) works flawlessly.

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Jonathan Q. Woolson
Louisville, CO 80027

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myPhoto references aside - this is a great hint. Since personal photos don't have the same copyright issues as commercially produced music, I wonder why Apple didn't include sharing over the Internet as a standard feature (as it did in the initial release of iTunes 4.0.)

I can only imagine that it had to do with concerns over upload speed. Big albums and large photos would make it slow.

Still - great hint, thanks! Can't wait to try this with my folks.

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Following a request from a macosxhint user who has used this (and got it working) - here are the full details of how to set up iPhoto 4 to share libraries across the Internet:
Let's say you want to look at a friend's iPhoto Library. His machine is the SERVER.
Your machine is the CLIENT - you need to have Network Beacon running on YOUR machine set up as follows:
1. Service name (eg Friend's Photos)
2. Service Type: _dpap._tcp. (check you have the underscore and the point in there and in the right order)
3. Port Number: 8770
4. Check 'Enable Host Proxy'
5. Host name: Your Friend's Host Name
6. IP Address (THIS IS THE IP ADDRESS OF YOUR FRIEND'S COMPUTER - YOU WILL NEED TO GET THIS FROM HIM)
7. Click OK
8. Tick the enabled box in the Network Beacon main window.
9. Ask your friend to make sure that he has the Sharing Preferences set correctly in iPhoto 4 - tick 'Share My Photos' - he can share ALL his Photo Library or choose to just share 1 or 2 albums - (it is better just to share 1 album initially as there are heavy network overheads in downloading all the thumbnails for an entire Library)

10. You need to have 'Look for Shared Photos' checked on your machine in iPhoto preferences.

You should then see the Network Beacon name (eg Friend's Photos) appear in iPhoto 4 (the left pane, underneath 'Last 12 months' album)
If YOU click on this then the album he has shared with you will appear. The speed with which the photos will appear will be dependent on the speed of his Internet UPLOAD connection.

*If it does not work then you MUST make sure that your friend has port 8770 open and forwarded to his internal LAN address if he is behind a router

For your friend to access YOUR libraries he will have to set up Network Beacon on his computer with YOUR details in 5 and 6.

Can I suggest that you get yourself and your friend a DNS name from http://www.dyndns.org. This makes setting these things up much simpler.

Get Network Beacon from here:
http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/NetworkBeacon.html

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Here's how I'm using ssh port tunneling to access an iPhoto library behind a NAT firewall, e.g. to get to your home photos from work. I'll assume you already have your firewall set up to forward ssh requests inside to some box on your home lan (doesn't necessarily need to be the same box running iphoto).

Set up Network Beacon:

• Service name: Home Photos
• Service type: _dpap._tcp.
• Port Number: whatever, e.g. 27005
• (don't enable Host Proxy)

Launch ssh:

ssh -g -L 27005:IPHOTO_SERVER:8770 YOUR_EXT_IP

The -g seems to be necessary (rtfm if you care). IPHOTO_SERVER is the internal, non-routable name or IP of your iPhoto server on your home lan. If your iPhoto server is the same box as you're ssh'ing into, then you can probably just put "localhost". Examples:

ssh -g -L 27005:192.168.0.4:8770 68.99.33.44
ssh -g -L 27005:localhost:8770 68.99.33.44

"Home Photos" should now show up in your local iPhoto client. Have fun!

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