Adding New User Account

Question

My parents use an iMac w/Intel Core 2 Duo running Leopard (10.5.4). When they set up the machine initially they set up a single account (we'll call it UserA) - which is the administrator account and the account that both of them use. I know this is a bad practice but this is where I am working from. It had not been a problem for them up until now as my mother's primary use for the computer had been Safari and using RDC to connect to her Windows box at work.
However, my mother is looking to have her own account set up so that she can have her documents, mail, ect. set up separately. The problem comes in with the apps that they share (i.e. iPhoto, iTunes). I would like both user accounts to see iTunes and iPhoto the same way. The have built up their music and photo collection collectively and would both like to be able to access the same libraries. I have gone as far as creating a new user (UserB) for my mother (as a standard account). I copied her documents from the administrator account (UserA) into her documents folder. What is the best approach to sharing iTunes and iPhoto libraries across the two user accounts? Thank you.

Answer 1

there are several ways to do that.
1. the easiest is to enable sharing in both itunes and iphoto. This will allow user A to see libraries of user B and vise versa. However, they won't be able to add stuff to each other libraries. also, this will only work when both of them are logged in at the same time. so you'll have to enable fast user switching in accounts preferences and keep both users logged in.
2. second easiest. if you have an external drive (or a partition of an internal drive) you can move itunes and iphoto libraries there and turn off ownership on that partition. select the partition, eneter command+i and in the info popup check the box "ignore ownership on this drive" at the bottom.
after you've moved itunes and iphoto libraries you need to point the apps to the new locations. hold option and start iphoto. You'll get a dialog asking you to choose the library. do the same for itunes.
3. you can use the method from [ Király 's post in this thread|http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2719139&#2719139].
Skip step 3) that he describes - it's not needed in Leopard.