We have one iMac(Lion) with two separate user accounts, two separate photo libraries and are going to get two iPhones. We have a primary and a secondary Apple ID. It should be easy to run two photo streams, one to each iPhone using both Apple IDs. I have read that the iMac will only run one photo stream from the Primary Apple ID. Is this really the case and have you a solution? I wondered if buying library manager and registering us both with it could help? Could the primary Apple ID then be used to stream to each of our libraries in turn?
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Magdalen Gee
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How Do I Use One Mac To Run iCloud Photo Stream for Two Users?
Comments: 4 Responses to “How Do I Use One Mac To Run iCloud Photo Stream for Two Users?”
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I think maybe you misunderstand what Photo Stream is. It exists as a part of your iCloud account. It doesn't "run" on your Mac. You are simply viewing the contents of the Photo Stream.
There are two types of Photo Streams. Your normal, main Photo Stream, and shared photo streams. You will always have exactly one main Photo Stream. But you can have 0 to several shared ones.
Think of your main Photo Stream as cloud storage for your new photos. When you take a new photo, it stores it in the cloud. Then you can see it on all of your devices.
But a shared Photo Stream is different because several people can view it. It is more like a shared gallery of photos.
So what to do depends on your goals. Each of you should have your own Apple ID and that includes a main photo stream. If you want to share photos between each other, then create one shared photo stream and share it to the other Apple ID. Then you have a photo stream that will show the same photos between each of you.
Thanks for your help. Our aim is to keep our two Photo Libraries quite separate but if we can only have one main Photo Stream we cant do that. I know that one computer can use a secondary Apple ID for Contacts/Calendars not for Photo Stream. I am hoping there might be a way round this - perhaps by using Photo Manager. Their site indicates such a possibility but lacks detail and I don't really see how they could do it.
So why not just set up a shared photo stream between the two of you like I suggest? Seems like that is exactly what a shared photo stream is for.
Magdalen- If you want to keep your two iPhoto Libraries completely separate that's very easy to do with one Mac: Simply set up a second OS X user account for the second person to use. This is essentially the same as having two computers; your two user accounts, although resident on the single Mac, have almost no interaction with each other except as you might specifically define. You can then use a shared Photo Stream as Gary suggests.
Set up a new user accounts in the Users & Groups preference pane within System Preferences.