Reader Charles Graham seeks a way to move an image from one Mac’s iPhoto library to another. He writes:
I have a couple of Macs in my home—one downstairs in my home office and another upstairs. I’m not very careful about where I keep the pictures I’ve put in iPhoto ’11. Some are stored on the downstairs Mac and others are upstairs. Is there a way I can easily move photos on one Mac to another without having to walk to the Mac that has that images?
There is. With the Macs connected to the same network launch iPhoto on each Mac, press Command-, (comma) to expose iPhoto’s preference window, and click the Sharing tab. Enable the Look For Shared Photos and Share My Photos options on each Mac. Under the Shared entry in iPhoto’s Library pane you should see the name of your other Mac.
Now select your other Mac, navigate to the pictures you want to copy to your Mac, and select them. Drag them to iPhoto’s Photos entry on your Mac. They’ll be added to that Mac’s iPhoto library. Alternatively you can drag them into an album on that Mac and they’ll be added to the album.
You can also import entire albums from one Mac to another. To do that, just select the album you want to import from the remote Mac and drag it to the Photos entry on the Mac you’re sitting in front of. It will import as an untitled event. Just Control- (Right) click on one of the images, choose Show Event, and you’ll be taken to the event that contains these images. You can now click on the Untitled Event entry at the top of the window and rename the event to something that’s easier for you to find.
Given how easy it is to grab images from another Mac, it’s in your best interest to switch on the Require Password option in iPhoto’s Sharing preferences, particularly when you’re out and about using public Wi-Fi. I mean, do you really want some creep in a coffee shop to have access to pictures of your kids? I thought not.