How do I share my iPhoto photos with my ubuntu partition?

Question

I have a MacBook Pro dual-booted with Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Karmic.

I have recently imported hundreds of my photos into iPhoto - but I now want to be able to see them (and use them as desktop/screen saver images) from my Ubuntu partition (ie when the machine is running Ubuntu instead of MacOS).

Is there an easy way to do this direct from the iPhoto library or do I have to shift them all out to an external file directory or something?

Further edit - just to make it clear: I have already uploaded my photos directly into iPhoto - then spent many days categorising, tagging and uploading to flickr. Unless there's something I'm missing, I'm guessing it's likely too late to do the "don't copy into the iPhoto library" option. Happy to be proven wrong :)

Perhaps somebody knows of a way to "export" the library without losing any of the current information - so that I can (from then on) keep the photos in an external library? I don't want to do this, though, if I lose the information that is currently there.

Answer 1

Ok, so after much mucking about I finally figured out how to access my photos. Not easy and not int he way I'd like, but I'm working on it.

First - I have to mount the Macintosh partition. I did this by clicking on it in Places, I had to enter my sudo password.

The macintosh partition then appears in nautlius, but when I then browsed to the folders I didn't have permission to see some of them... so instead, I went to to terminal and "sudo su" to get myself a super user and just cd to the appropriate directory.

In my case it was

cd /media/Mactintosh\ HD/Users/<myusername>/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library

In that directory you'll have a folder called "Originals" and folder called "Modified".

Obviously the originals are in the first and anything you've edited will be in the second. The images are stored by year and then in folder named after the "events" for that year.

Answer 2

You'll need to create a referenced iphoto library - this way the source pictures are not stored inside the iphoto library but can be anywhere.

Go to preferences - advanced and uncheck the 'copy items to the iphoto library'

Answer 3

I would make a seperate (FAT32) partition for files you want to acess both from OSX and Ubuntu. (This way you avoid mounting your entire OSX drive from Ubuntu.) Then you can make an alias to the FAT32 partition, or to a folder on this partition, and place that in your iPhoto folder.