Can iPhoto meet my user sharing & back-up needs?

Hi all and happy new year,
I have been struggling with iPhoto ever since I switched to a mac a year ago. Most importantly for me I want to share a library of shared family photos with my wife who has her own user profile on our mac, Apple's published solutions seem messy and spawn other issues. My needs boil down to the below points:
1. I want to share a photo library with other users of my iMac so we can all edit the photos. Ideally the library should not need to be open or closed on one user profile in order to be useable by another.
2. I want to be able to back-up the mac including the shared photos using time machine. Ideally the mac should hold the master copy so the back-up is on the external HD (if the master and the back-up are both on the external HD then it doesn't provide security against damage to the drive etc)
The simple solution to 1. would be for an iPhoto library saved in the 'shared' section of the mac HD to be useable by all users. However, this doesn't work - if you do this it becomes highly unstable and I am worried that it may end up corrupting the entire library. Apple proposes two 'solutions' which can only be described as messy workarounds (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1198?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US ) and both hold problems as far as I can see and prevent meeting need 2.:
a. Moving the iPhoto library to an external drive - It seems this will prevent the time machine back-up from including the photos. And even if it can I only want one external drive (I am contemplating a time capsule), and this would mean the back-up would be on the same drive as the primary library. Furthermore more than one user cannot have the iPhoto album open at the same time which is highly irritating.
b. Moving the iPhoto library to a disk image - this strikes me as a highly messy solution, not least because you have to guess what size your library will grow to in the future (or build in massive surplus). It also appears to mean that time machine back-up will not include the photos.
I haven’t actually yet tried either of the above for the reasons noted – please correct me if I am wrong.
A possible better solution would be to have iPhoto reference all the photos from a conventional folder structure which looks to be possible, but I have seen online that this does not work very well with iPhoto and I don't want to waste my time trying it if it isn't going to work.
Perhaps you gurus out there can let me know if there is a neat solution to meet 1. and 2. If there isn’t, can other software packages (e.g. picasa) meet these needs and is there any major drawbacks in terms of integration? I wanted to stick with iPhoto as Apple products are meant to work seamlessly with each other.
Furthermore I have another ‘nice to have’ requirement:
3. It would like to be able to access my photos remotely via a browser or otherwise. It would be even better if I could access them on my iPad (but I don't want all my photos (c.50 GBs) stored on the cloud or copied to the iPad).
I was looking at purchasing a time capsule. Can this be used to both enable 3. and hold wireless time machine back-ups? And if so, what software/app is best i.e. can iPhoto or other software also enable this ?
Thanks is advance!

1. I want to share a photo library with other users of my iMac so we can all edit the photos. Ideally the library should not need to be open or closed on one user profile in order to be useable by another.
Yes with limitations - iPhoto is not a multip user program - the best way to share it is on a direly connected external drive with permissions ignored - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1198 -  you are incorret that having the iPhoto library on an exterenal drive prevents TM from backing it up - TM is very happy to backup external drives - in the TM preferences under options just be sure that the EHD is not excluded
2. I want to be able to back-up the mac including the shared photos using time machine. Ideally the mac should hold the master copy so the back-up is on the external HD (if the master and the back-up are both on the external HD then it doesn't provide security against damage to the drive etc)
Of course you can - this is not an iPhoto question but a Time Machine question but yes - TM does not appearently backup open files so you need to be sure that iPhoto is not running all the time - and of course you need two external drives - one for the iPhoto library and one for the TM backup
3. It would like to be able to access my photos remotely via a browser or otherwise. It would be even better if I could access them on my iPad (but I don't want all my photos (c.50 GBs) stored on the cloud or copied to the iPad).
No - you can not access the iPhoto library from a browser or an IOS device - you can put photos on Flickr or Facebook and acceess them via a browser  from eithe an iPad or a comptuer
ANd no you should not use a referenced library - it has many problems and does not accomplish anything you want - in fact it has no advanadges at all and many drawbacks - see the user tip on Photo and FIle management for more information - https://discussions.apple.com/community/ilife/iphoto?view=documents
most of your post is not about meeting sharing and backup needs - thos are easy and described above - most of it is about wnating it to work differently than it does because you think that is better --  it actaully does woerk like it works and will do what you want - you appearently aren't happy with that and want it to work differently
As to other software - that is beyond the scope of this Iphoto for Mac suport forum
ANd yes a TIme Capsule is an excellant extrnal hard drive and works very will with Time Macnine
LN

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