We're using two iMacs (I think they're iMacs, I have so little experience with Apple after 25 years of primarily using PC), one OS Monterey v. 12.5, the other OS Catalina 10.15.7; both with individual licenses of Photo Mechanic Plus version 6.0 build 6496.
Damnit, Jim, I'm a photographer not an IT specialist!
I really need some help figuring out the best way to make our in-house cataloging/accessing work, please. We have an outside IT dude I can show this thread to in order to help implement whatever solutions we arrive at.
We have two visual media men at this company. It's a scrappy family business and we all split duties. I (Joshua) handle some stills, all the video, some graphic design and some post-production. He (Chris) handles the majority of stills, web implementation, newsletter building and the majority of post-production/illustration work. We each need access to the media being produced by the other. I'm not sure if any of that's relevant other than to say we have different types of files being produced on two different computers that we both need to access. Down the road (in a few months) I'd like two other people on site to be able to download from the catalog as well with two more licensed copies of PM+.
I used to be a photojournalist and Photo Mechanic was my go to, and I was excited to see the cataloging feature appear. But I clearly am in over my head when it comes to setting this up.
Chris and I have the only two Macs in the building. The seven other desks are PCs. There is a central server the entire company has access to for group file storage. Our IT dude has attached a couple of linked external hard drives (that read as one drive) to this server for our media catalog. Eventually this will be a larger bay drive but with the chip shortage, etc. this has been our stopgap measure.
I was using PM for a while in-house before I set up the catalog on this pair of external drives. I seemed to set up the catalog with no real issues as far as I can tell. I add files as needed, sync the catalog and everything appears and is accessible. Not all of the vocabulary makes sense to me but I'll chalk that up to beginner's lack of familiarity.
Last week Chris installed PM+ on his Mac, but we didn't get much farther than install and opening. Now this week we've tried to access the catalog from his computer but it requires re-integration (which we try, but the process never completes) before he can access. If I try to access it, he can't. If he tries to access it, I can't. Looking through the troubleshooting it looks like this is a single user catalog? I need to figure out a workaround or something here...maybe I'm missing something obvious to other people.
How do we set this up so that both Chris and I can upload to the catalog and sync it as needed, and four desks can access the catalog for downloads?
I don't know what follow up questions to anticipate here, so I'll leave it there.
Many thanks!
-Joshua
