Best way to manage media (photos/music/videos) across user accounts in Lion?

Yesterday I clean installed Lion. I copied only that what I need from my TimeMachine backup. The apps were reinstalled as well. Now, I've set up iPhoto to link to my library in the Users>shared folder so that its available across all user accounts shared with my family members. Same is the case with iTunes library. But with integration with iCloud and @me.com or @mac.com accounts, I'm not sure how each one of us can have out own accounts configured in these libraries while they are shared. Keeping this in mind, what is the best way to share music, videos and photos across user accounts and yet have the apps... iTunes, iPhoto, etc, know our individual settings in out respective user accounts?
For iTunes should I just create a referenced library? Will that let me sync my photos and videos to my iPhone 4? If so, how?
For iPhoto I guess i''ll have to create separate libraries for each user account and then have one common for our shared photos. But thats just plain complicated for users who aren't tech savvy in my family.
Please advice before I create a mess with my media again!

Thanks for the idea, but that strategy introduces problems of its own. Now I have two iPods (a 5G and a touch) that sync with one library and an iPhone that syncs with another. This makes my life workable on the road, but at home, it means I have to change iTunes libraries when I sync different devices. It also means that, when I download new content, if I want to take it with me on my MBP, I have to synchronize it between two libraries. That sounds like an ugly situation.

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