viewing photos from a server using aperture 2

-I am not a techie and -I hope I get this right. i am the photographer at the college I work at. I am using Aperture 2 to put keywords on my photos. The college techies want me to put my photos on a server ( I really don't totally understand this concept) so staff/faculty can search and download them by using keywords. The faculty and staff may not edit the photos while they are on the server. They can edit them after they download them. Is this at all possible....

Mike Adams

No can do. The short answer is that Aperture keywords and other metadata (ratings, etc) are not visible outside of the Aperture software itself. And even if all your colleagues did have Aperture, its libraries are not multi-user.
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Steve Maller :: Burlingame, CA :: Canon gear

Thanks Steve for your answer.....I was wondering if Lightroom do the trick..

Mike Adams

adams said:

Thanks Steve for your answer.....I was wondering if Lightroom do the
trick..

Click to expand...

No, it does not.

You could use referenced masters, store them on the server. Then create a copy of your library (sans masters now) and put it on the server. Other people could open that copy of the library with their copy of Aperture. For this to work probably your copy of the library would have to sit on the server as well. Automate the creation of copy of the library and this might be a workable solution (still only one person at a time could access the images and it would be read-only for them). Would work (or not work) the same with LR.

What you would need would be a private version of Flickr (but the software behind this is one of the real assets of Yahoo!).

--Would you be able to do a keyword search using your approach?

Mike Adams

adams said:

--Would you be able to do a keyword search using your approach?

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Yes. But I would simply try it out with a small test library (the automatic copying could be done with various backup and synchronisation applications, one problem that could arise is that Aperture might have be closed before you could successfully copy the library).

If I used Aperture 2 and mobileme would I be able to do what I want.....

Mike Adams

adams said:

If I used Aperture 2 and mobileme would I be able to do what I want.....

Click to expand...

Not really, you can put keywords as a caption on the website and you don't even need MobileMe for that but that is a far cry from searching the keywords.

Thanks to all for your imput....It looks like we are going to go with a program called Imagefolio Pro. I like Aperture better but Imagefolio seems to do the job more thoroughly.

Mike Adams