How to synchronize IPhoto libraries between several Macs?

Adding Lightroom to my workflow

• Help me get Lightroom to play nicely with my photo library on OS X. Caveat: I don't want Lightroom to handle EVERY photo, just the raw files. Any advice appreciated. I looked at previous AskMes and while http://ask.metafilter.com/174529/Photo-processing-workflow-for-nonphotographers was close it didn't have an answer for me. I have three Macs. I keep my photos synchronized between all three - my MacBook Pro, my wife's MacBook, and a backup drive attached to an older Mini. When I shoot raw files, I am opening them on my MBP and importing them to Lightroom to develop them. Shooting in raw is my New Year's resolution, I guess. Prior to this I mostly just shot in jpg. My wife's point-and-shoot also saves everything as a jpg. Right now, our folder structure is organized as YYYY/YYYY_MM_DD/ on import. I regularly synchronize the photos between the computers, so that anything my wife uploaded from her camera will end up on my computer, and vice versa. The backup to the Mini is a one-way shot, not two-way. It's storage only, we don't edit files on the Mini. I am using Lightroom 3.3. I am also using Picasa. I am using Picasa because it is the only photo management software I can find that doesn't care what I do to my photos outside of itself. This makes it dead easy to sync files between computers. If I add a jpg to a folder, when I sync, my wife's Picasa will see it and it will show up in her image database. This is great and it works well. The kicker is the raw files. She likes my photos and she wants copies. She doesn't have Lightroom nor does she want to fuss with it. I don't copy my Lightroom catalog onto her Mac. I have been syncing the raw files though, as I like redundant backups. Picasa can see raw images and it will show them to her, but it obviously can't read the develop settings so things look like crap. I have disabled raw support in Picasa, to keep it from potentially changing my photo metadata. I plan to do this on my wife's computer too - but that means she can't see the raw files any more. A related issue is that I want to have her photos on my Mac too. But I am using Picasa to check on them, not Lightroom, as I see no advantage to importing jpg files into Lightroom - I am not going to change them at all, and Picasa might change the metadata on next open anyway, so why bother cluttering my catalog? When I import, I only import the raw files. My dream setup is something like this: I import photos from the camera, using the Canon camera software (good or bad, I like it, and will continue to use it for the import step). Any jpgs stay in the original folder where Picasa can find them. The raw files are imported in place into Lightroom (manually if need be). I make changes. I export the developed shots back into the original folder, where my wife can see them with Picasa. I am OK with manually importing the raw files this way, even if it is tedious because Lightroom won't filter on file extension during import. This would be easier if I had a separate folder structure for the raw images (eg ~/Pictures/Raw/YYYY/etc.), which is kind of what I really want - but then exporting a batch might be hard as I'd have to manually sort them into the right destination folder. I organize my shots by date, not by any other scheme, because dates are simple and take guesswork out of categorizing them. That's what keywords and metadata is for. But my camera software can't export raw or jpg into different folders based on file type, and my wife occasionally uses my camera on full auto so it will not always contain just raw images. My Lightroom catalog already references my existing folders, so moving them might be a problem. Abandoning Picasa is a no-go. iPhoto won't sync between computers, we both kind of hate it, she's used Picasa for years and knows how to make it work for her, and it's super easy for her to use the built-in export options to share photos online or order prints. I'm half decent with AppleScript and figure there must be a solution, but don't know where to start here. Any suggestions welcome. Help?

• Answer:

  1) Stop using the Canon import software, and use the functionality built into Lightroom. You can tell LR how you want the photos to be automagically organized when they're imported, which is a very nice feature. 2) Stop shooting JPEGs. If you're using Lightroom, you might as well do everything in RAW. Storage is cheap. 3) Set up a second folder structure for your RAW files. These will "live" solely on your Macbook Pro. Lightroom should let you do RAW/YYYY/YYYY_MM_DD/ 4) Set up an export preset (or whatever LR calls it these days) to export your photos to the usual JPEG folder tree that you've been using. You should be able to coax LR into following your existing folder structure. 5) Import and process your RAW photos. Once you're done with that, export them. They will then live happily alongside your JPEGs, as if they were never RAW to begin with. You can both continue to use Picasa to your heart's content. Also, consider a Dropbox account to keep things in sync instead of your existing manual synchronization dance. It's MAGIC. It's not cheap for a larger account, but you get a great deal of value out of it -- it "just works," and also doubles as a backup, rudimentary version control, and remote access solution.