Help... OS X server or what?

[Irritated Jones]

I need help and I haven't gotten much from Apple Store employees. The situation in our home.
*1 iMac (2011) 1 TB backing up to external mybook. My work and personal computer
*1 MacBook (2009) 750 GB backing up to cloud and external my book this is my wife's computer for picture editing and work. Maxed out with pictures.
*5 apple tvs
* 4 iPads
* 2 iPhones

So the issue is my wife loves pictures and takes a ton of them and isn't super great at deleting pictures. Meaning most of the 750GB on her MacBook is pictures. Currently she tries to back up to the my-book and she has a cloud account she's backing the pictures up to. I'm not crazy about the cloud account and would much rather have them saved on my site and possibly offsite at a parents house.

I would like to be able to store all our media and files and pictures in one central location and access it from any of our devices. So I've looked at the NAS devices that our out there, but it seems to be hit or miss on how well they integrate with Apple TVs and everything else Apple. So my thought was to take my iMac and turn it into an OS X server or get a Mac Mini and run it as a server with a tower of external hard drives that I can swap or even have the ability to make a copy of one of those drives to take off site from time to time.

I just need something that is easy and convenient for her to use and that will work seamlessly as possible between all our devices. Photo storing software can also be suggested as I've heard Apple Photos is not great for storing mass photos.

Thanks,
Kris

 

[Hilbert92]

Check out synology network attached storage.

 

[krazirob]

use apple back to my mac feature.....so here is my setup

I have a mac pro at home ethernet connected to my airport extreme in which i have a 3 TB hard drive connected to. I put all my data on there (and you can even put your photo library on there) and I can access that hard drive no matter where I am in the world just using back to my mac feature. Now if you want multiple apple ids accessing the hard drive at home then OS Server would be perfect. Then you can make your iMac the server and give everyone (you and your wife) access to the server with or without permissions.....

best thing about server is you can have multiple devices access to your data. So if your parents want to use that server you could give them access to just their stuff and not your stuff through the server.

Is that the answer you wanted? I use OS Server and back to my mac so glad to help where i can
[doublepost=1475966208][/doublepost]heck if you have a static IP you could always just connect to server (input your airports IP) and then your in. I have done that as well. Only works if your ISP gives you a static IP address......if you have auto DNS then OS Server will work great for you.

at the end of the day its only 20 bucks and you can do alot with it.

 

[satcomer]

Your wife sounds like she needs a NAS (I suggest a Synology DS416play or a QNAP TS-451A) and transfer her pictures to the NAS. This way she can save space!