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Two Photo Streams into iPhoto

M

MadDogMike

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 27, 2008
31
1
Atlanta, GA
We have a small child, so we take lots of photos. So, every photo I take with my iPhone goes into my Photo Stream, which is then downloaded into iPhoto on our Mac. Perfect. Except my wife takes a lot of photos on her iPhone, too. I'd like her Photo Stream to download to our Mac's iPhoto, too. Is there any way to do that?

I just implemented Family Sharing between us, the marketing for which gave me the impression it would do just what I wanted. However, it doesn't seem to do so. It only sets up a shared Family album on each of our devices. We would have to manually add photos into that album for them to be shared.

That's not what we want. We want everything from both of our iPhone's Photo Streams to download into our Mac's iPhoto. Then we have all of our family photos in one place. Possible? (I'm thinking not, but it should be!)
 
MadDogMike said:
We have a small child, so we take lots of photos. So, every photo I take with my iPhone goes into my Photo Stream, which is then downloaded into iPhoto on our Mac. Perfect. Except my wife takes a lot of photos on her iPhone, too. I'd like her Photo Stream to download to our Mac's iPhoto, too. Is there any way to do that?

I just implemented Family Sharing between us, the marketing for which gave me the impression it would do just what I wanted. However, it doesn't seem to do so. It only sets up a shared Family album on each of our devices. We would have to manually add photos into that album for them to be shared.

That's not what we want. We want everything from both of our iPhone's Photo Streams to download into our Mac's iPhoto. Then we have all of our family photos in one place. Possible? (I'm thinking not, but it should be!)
Click to expand...

I don't know if there is an easier way, but this is the only way I have gotten it to work. My wife and I each have separate users on our iMac. I setup the iPhoto library to be shared with my wife's user account on the iMac. When she opens iPhoto on her profile her Photostream photos will be there. I organize the photos into events (ex. Sept 2014, Oct 2014, etc). She closes iPhoto. Switch to my user account and open iPhoto. My Photostream is there. I will then take my Photostream photos and move them into the correct events I have already created. To view on our iPhones I have setup to auto-sync the last 6 months worth of pictures.

If you decide to go this route, be sure to only have iPhoto open with one user account at a time. Its possible to mess up the iPhoto library if both accounts have it open.

Here is an apple support article about it:
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201517

The easiest way for Apple to implement would to be able to login to more than one iCloud account in iPhoto.
 
This is something I'd desperately like to do. We have a 6 month old. As you can imagine, my wife and I take hundreds of pictures on our phones. We'd love it if we were both tapped into a family photo stream (an automatic one like the main photostream, not a iCloud photostream I have to manually share to) so we can both see ALL of the photos we're taking, seamlessly. Then of course we can make it the screensaver on the Apple TV and be even happier. :cool:

Here's another use-case: Right now I'm building a "First 6 Months" photo album in iPhoto, but I'm only building it using my own photos. I have to dig through 6 months of her photos in her iPhoto, export the ones I want, then import into my iPhoto. I know it's specific, but a family photo stream would be ideal here. If I'm managing my family's photos, I'd want to be managing all of them in one place.

Trying IFTTT, but I don't think it quite works with "streams" as they are different than "albums" in the iOS photos app.

I'm hoping Family Sharing will enable this in the near future. Particularly when the new OS X photos app comes out. Does anyone with knowledge of the app, know if this is a feature?

I know I sound "gimme gimme gimme", but this seems like a no brainer for the Family Sharing functionality.
 
In my searches I've found it to be a very common request, and the method mentioned by @lemieuxfan67 is the only solution I've seen suggested. In my case, we don't actually have a family Mac that we share, we each have our own MacBooks. I aggregate all the photos on mine, via my Photo Stream and occasionally syncing her iPhone to my Mac. I'm not sure having two separate users is any easier than that, though it is somewhat more automated.

And yes, I agree, since it's such a common request and one that most families would enjoy, it should be a no-brainer. They are making steps in that direction with Family Sharing, so shared Photo Streams ought to be the next logical progression, and easy for Apple to setup, too.
 
Yeah, those work arounds might work, but not really in practice. I've tried a few, even used automator and applescript to automate some of the things that needed to be in place for it to work properly. My main issue/concern is having to rely on someone else to maintain the integrity of your precious photo library.

I left Apple feedback. Maybe you guys can do the same?

https://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html
 
I am in a holding pattern until the details of the new Photos app for mac (coming in 2015) is released. While it would be nice if the Photos app can pull from two different iCloud Photo accounts, I'm not holding my breath. In my opinion the easiest solution would be to add an option to automatically upload pictures to the Family Sharing album. Since that storage does not count against your iCloud storage I don't see this happening either.

To be fair to Apple...I don't know of any other Family photo syncing feature on their competitors (Android, Windows, Dropbox, Flickr) that does not require using the same account also.
 
In my mind, I have decided that the new Photos app will solve all of our photo management problems. My fingers are crossed. And I don't fault Apple for not having this feature, but it would be nice if they started thinking more about multiple people in a household. They're getting better at it.

You got me thinking though.. there is a fairly nice and easy way to do this with Dropbox and IFTTT. (with one drawback) I just tried it and it worked like gangbusters!

1) Set up Automatic Camera Upload in Dropbox for all parties.
2) Create a folder on Dropbox called "Family Photos" (or whatever you'd like) and share the folder with all parties.
3) Set up seperate IFTTT accounts for all parties.
4) Create the IFTTT recipe: IF "new photo in folder" (Camera Uploads) THEN "add file from url" (set to folder Family Photos)
5) Create the same recipe for all parties. Making sure all the info is the same.

Wallah! Now any photo you take gets automatically uploaded to Dropbox, then COPIED over to another shared folder via IFTTT. All parties will then have all the photos. The one drawback is that you're making a copy of the photo, so it'll be in both folders and you'll be taking up twice the amount of space.
 
Actually, as I'm doing this, I think there may be an even easier way where you can take IFTTT completely out of the equation.

Simply share the "Camera Uploads" folder with all parties on Dropbox. They'll have the same "Camera Uploads" folder so the two will meld together.

Now your Camera Uploads folder has everyone's photos. I'll try to test this this weekend.
 
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