Using web galleries with multiple libraries
If you publish some of your photos to galleries using Facebook or Flickr, there are a few things that are good to know for dealing with these galleries when you have multiple iPhoto libraries.
You can publish web galleries from any of your iPhoto libraries. Any galleries you publish will all show up on the relevant together, no matter what library they originally came from. If you publish a gallery from one library, then open up another library and sync your galleries, iPhoto will automatically download the contents of all your galleries into that library as well. Note that if you add a photo to an existing gallery from one library, the next time that gallery is synced with another library, that photo will be downloaded into the gallery in that second library as well.
If you don't want your galleries to appear in a particular library, then:
- If you're using iPhoto 9, open iPhoto's preferences, go to the "Accounts" section, select your account in the list on the left, and click the "-" button below the account list to remove the account. This will cause your galleries from that website to no longer be synced with that library, though the galleries and their photos will remain as-is on the website itself.
- For earlier versions of iPhoto, open up the library, open iPhoto's preferences, go to the "Web" section, and select to check for updates "Manually". If some galleries have already been synced with the library, there is no way to remove those galleries from the library without also deleting them from the server, but any additional changes and galleries will not be synced to that library.
In the library you originally published a particular gallery from, iPhoto shares a single copy of each photo between the original album you created and the gallery itself. As a result, these photos will appear both in your gallery and in your main Photos/Events lists. In other libraries, however, when iPhoto downloads photos from the website, those photos will only appear when you select the gallery, and will not appear in your Photos/Events lists. If you want those photos to appear there, you will need to drag the photos from your gallery and drop them on either the Photos or Events item at the top of the album list on the left.
By default, when you upload photos to a web gallery, iPhoto creates reduced size versions of the photos to make the uploading process faster. This means that if you later download those photos into another library from the website, you will not receive the same full resolution photos that you had in the original library. To avoid this, when you publish your gallery, click the "Show Advanced" button and use the pop-up menu that is revealed to choose to publish full sized versions of your photos instead of reduced size versions.
If you delete a gallery from one library, that will entirely delete the gallery from the website, and the next time you open any of your other iPhoto libraries that have copies of those galleries, iPhoto will automatically remove the gallery from those libraries as well. It will give you a chance to import the photos into your library before it gets rid of the gallery, but there is no way to keep the gallery in the library once it's been deleted from the website. There is no way to keep only some galleries in one library, and only other galleries in another library - it's all or nothing, so if you want to have some galleries appear in a library, you will need to have all of them appear in that library.