10.6.2 Snow Leopard Bug with Syncing IPhoto Libraries and Mobile Home Directories (Mobile Users)

I discovered a recent bug with 10.6.2 Snow Leopard in which the iPhoto Library folder is not correctly synced at login and logout.¬† This annoying issue leaves each user with a prompt to decide if they should keep the network copy or the local copy of the iPhoto library even though neither has changed.¬† This results in duplicate iPhoto Libraries being created as each user logs in and out РSince most users chose keep both copies the iPhoto library is duplicated.

You can see that this quickly can be a problem with our 2000+ users syncing to an Xserve Raid duplicating the iPhoto library over and over is unacceptable.  A quick search through the apple forums shows that this issue has been acknowledged although no fix is yet available.

Here is my fix using Terminal and ARD.  The key to this fix is using the nifty unix command of find.

To clear up the sync issues it is necessary to run the equivalent of this command on both the end machines and the server which house the mobile home directories.

On the server end run this command as root.

√√∏sudo find /path to user home directories -name “iPhoto Library-“* -exec rm -r {} \;

This command will search for each instance of a directory called iPhoto Library-, notice the – sign with this in place this command will not delete the users original iPhoto Library but will instead only delete each synced duplicate – this is because they are in the name format of /Users/user/Pictures/iPhoto Library-local-local-network or something similar.

This is the command I ran on the server which houses half of all mobile home directories.

To clear up the duplicates on all of the client machines it is necessary to run an identical command on all machines.  The easiest way I found to do this was to use ARD and use the UNIX command

Here selecting all user workstations I run as user ROOT the same command starting the find command in the Users directory.

Here are the command results, if you look through them you will see that it says error /users/user/iPhoto Library-local-local does not exists – this is because the command was successful and that it deleted all traces of the duplicated iPhoto Library.

I hope this temporary fix may help others since Apple can be slow at time to release fix similar issues.  If this issue becomes frequent I will followup with a command to alter the permissions on the iPhoto Library file and to examine the sync preferences to determine where this problem first arises.  For now I plan to run these commands as necessary and await an official fix from Apple.

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