Transfer my iphoto library to my wife's macbook

Question

Hi,
I have been backing up my iphoto library onto my external using time machine pretty regularly. My wife recently bought herself a Macbook Pro, and we have run across our first of a series of hurdles in trying to get these photos off the external onto her MBP. Here are some questions that I would really appreciate obtaining help in answering:
1). In attempting to import these photos off the external and into the new MBP, we run into permission errors (tried the 'browse other time machine disks' route, but navigating to the required backup terminated in a folder with a 'no-entry' sign). Is there a nice neat way around this?
2) Is there anyway of both of us backing our iphoto libraries into one common backup on the external, or will they have to be partitioned as they currently are? I want my wife to be able to plug the external in, select and restore the albums that she wants, without having to jump through too many hoops. I understand that this may be going against the system's way of doing it. What is the best way of going about it?
3) Lastly, (i don't know if this is the right forum, but here goes...) I thought I knew how time machine works, but I must be missing something. The very initial backup that I did contained my entire iphoto library at that point in time, right? I then proceeded to delete and add new photos into my library on my laptop, backing up regularly. So i have several backups of the various changes in the state of my library. Now, I cannot seem to restore a single event of a particular backup. Every time I try to do so, time machine restores that particular iphoto state. Any way around this?
I hope that my questions are clear.
Thanks.
Felix

Answer 1

Greetings,
1). In attempting to import these photos off the external and into the new MBP, we run into permission errors (tried the 'browse other time machine disks' route, but navigating to the required backup terminated in a folder with a 'no-entry' sign). Is there a nice neat way around this?
Do not restore the library from the Time Machine backup to your Wife's computer. Go to your computer where the library lives and drag it onto the drive. Plug the drive into her computer and drag that library onto her computer. There are ways around the permissions issues but they are more time consuming than just copying the library from the source (your computer).
You might want to try restoring your iPhoto Library to your own computer (keep the original as well) just to reassure yourself that your backup is working correctly.
2) Is there anyway of both of us backing our iphoto libraries into one common backup on the external, or will they have to be partitioned as they currently are?
She can backup to the same backup drive using Time Machine. Just plug the drive into her computer and tell Time Machine to use this drive. The only downsides I can think of:
__You will run out of space on the backup drive more rapidly with two computers going to the same place.
__You cannot have the drive plugged into both computers at the same time.
__If the drive fails, you lose your backup of both computers.
3) Lastly, (i don't know if this is the right forum, but here goes...) I thought I knew how time machine works, but I must be missing something. The very initial backup that I did contained my entire iphoto library at that point in time, right? I then proceeded to delete and add new photos into my library on my laptop, backing up regularly. So i have several backups of the various changes in the state of my library. Now, I cannot seem to restore a single event of a particular backup. Every time I try to do so, time machine restores that particular iphoto state. Any way around this?
Time Machine does incremental backups. So every change you make is recorded for that point in time. To restore individual photos or events, launch iPhoto and go to File > Browse Backups. Click on the desired date in time in the timeline on the right, click on the image or event and then click on "Restore". This will restore that selected image / events to the current library.
Hope that helps.