How to setup a Picasa server for my photos

Question

I use Picasa extensively on my computer to manage all my photos, but I have several computers at home, and what I'd like is to be able to access the database and the photos on that machine (the "Picasa server", to call it properly) from any computer on the house, and be able to modify it.

For example, I could no only see photos on other computers (I guess the image folder should be shared, just that), but I should be able to star a photo, edit it or any other operation, and all the changes should be updated so every computer on my network should see the database updated with new starred photos, edited photos, albums, tagged faces, etc.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

That is probably not possible because the starring and other data is stored by Picasa separately from the photos using a mechanism that, so far as I know, isn't designed for multiple concurrent users.

You can share photos using Picasa Web Albums (the online service) but, so far as I know, Google haven't released the server code for that.

Someone has worked out a way to share Picasa data between multiple PCs but it ends with this warning:

Warning: as stated before, I have not tested what happens when multiple users access / attempt to update Picasa data at the same time, but I assume it’s not a very good idea. We’re ‘cheating’ here, Picasa was not designed to work in a multi-user environment, so let’s plat safe: only one computer and one user should access it any one time.