For the past 7 years, my wife and I have been taking photos and trying to figure out how to both share those between us. Sometimes, I have the camera, and take great shots, then transfer them to my computer. Other times, same story, but Holly is in charge and it’s her computer the photos end up on.

I’ve wished iPhoto allowed us to share a single library, but I can’t even get my entire library properly shared between my two iMacs, the MacBook Air, my iPad and iPhone. I have a lot of machines, and my pictures are always on the wrong one.

Not any more.

This week, we bought an Eye-Fi card for our Nikon D90. It allows us to take photos, and seamlessly transfers them over wi-fi to a computer on our network. It’s like beautiful magic. I love how it works, and it’s perfect.

But that isn’t enough. Which computer to shove the photos onto? How do we get beyond the same problem of multiple machines with different libraries?

Enter Dropbox, shared folders, and my Mac Mini (our always-on media center machine). Now, when we take a photo, it’s transferred to our Mac Mini, which accepts the photos and puts them in a Dropbox folder that I’ve shared with my wife. Then, either of us can sort through the photos and delete the crappy/fuzzy/poorly lit ones. The ones we want to keep, we can crop, edit, Instagram-ify, and save in a separate Dropbox folder (again shared) that we then organize all fancy like (by date and/or event). And with Dropbox‘s amazing web browser, it’s super easy to take a bunch of photos, move to any of our computers, grab the ones we want, throw them into a unique folder, and send a link to our family to share within seconds, and the best part is they can simply view them, or download them if they like.

It is the perfect solution, and one I’ve been waiting for for a long time.

Thank you Dropbox and Eye-Fi.