MacOS – Symbolic linking to Photos from another user

macospermissionphotos

I am running El Capitan Beta, but this question would also apply to Yosemite.

I want another account's (account B) "Photos" app to link to my primary account's (account A) Photos library without moving my library to an outside drive without permissions. I can't point the Library from the Photos App in account B to to the Library in account A. I have added Account B with full permission read and write with extended ACL permissions to account A's /User/AccountA/Pictures folder and Photos Library. Verified with ls -le.

So… the best solution I see is to create a hard link from /User/AccountB/Pictures/AccountBLibrary -> /User/AccountA/Pictures/AccountALibrary so that it always points to that inode. Can anyone see a reason NOT to do this or a better way to link the two without moving my photos library on Account A.

Edit: Well for one – you can't hard link a directory (which obviously pictures libraries are)… so to reword my question – What about soft link? (Symbolic) (Thanks fd0). And now I can see – It produces the same error (because it isn't a hard link). So… can I accomplish this?

The goal is to not duplicate photos (I use iCloud photo library, but I don't want to duplicate even "optimized" photos).

Best Answer

The iPhoto library is a package container not really a single file. There are .plist, .db and other files in the package that might get altered differentially when you open via the different accounts. This might contribute to the problems people mentioned. Crazy idea, and I haven't tried it, but it might be better to recreate the package content on the new account using symbolic links to the folders that contain the actual photos on the old account. This way all the .plist, .db and related files in the package can remain local to the new account, but you accomplish your goal of not copying the actual photos. I definitely would back up the library before giving this a try.

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Homebrew permission issues

Very old question but I thought I'd mention that some people (including me) chown the homebrew /usr/local/ directory so you can run everything in it without issue. I used:

sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local

MacOS – Set inherited permissions on iLifeAssetManagement

I would try to avoid ACL's: they are tricky and often behave unexpectedly.

If I were you, I would try stick to standard UNIX permission, following these guidelines:

Create a user group (say, MeAndWife)
Make sure users Me and Wife are the ones and only members of MeAndWife
Change group ownership of sub directory to MeAndWife by something like chgrp -hR MeAndWife '/Users/Wife/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub'
Grant the owning group members the same permissions which are granted to the owning user: this may be obtained in several ways, but one that I like is by running find '/Users/Wife/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub' -group MeAndWife -and -perm -u=r -and -not -perm -g=r -exec chmod -h g+r {} \; [this basically states: Find files/folders with owning group MeAndWife, for which owning user does have read permission, but owning group members do not; and give owning group members read permissions]. Of course you should repeat this step for write and execute permissions (just replace -u=r and -g=r with, respectively, -u=w and -g=w for write, -u=x and -g=x for execute).
Finally, I think that if you want to be able to navigate to the sub directory from your account, then you need to make the full path to your sub directory searchable by everyone. That means, run through chmod o+x '/Users/Wife/Library', chmod o+x '/Users/Wife/Library/Application Support', chmod '/Users/Wife/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement' and chmod o+x '/Users/Wife/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets'

That should do the job: new files in sub should inherit group ownership (MeAndWife) and permissions (same as owning user). If you find that that is not the case, you could use launchd in conjuction with a very simple script to fix file permissions periodically (say, hourly).

Best Answer

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MacOS – Set inherited permissions on iLifeAssetManagement

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