Sharing Your Photos On A Home Network

USB hard drives - USB hard drives have become widely accepted for external storage of computer files making them ideal for storing your digital pictures. Plug them into your computer’s USB port, power up, and you have huge amounts of additional storage space. This is an easy method to store (and backup) your digital pictures. Unfortunately if you have multiple computers around your house and want to view your photos on another computer, you need to power down the USB hard drive, unplug it, move it to the other computer, plug it in, and then power it up again. A cumbersome process. There are other options.

Sharing USB hard drive via networked host computer - One is to set up a network, and then find a way to get your USB hard drive connected to the network. There are several methods to accomplish this. For example you could keep your USB hard drive permanently connected to one of the networked computers (acting as a host) and ’share’ the drive with a client computer, networked using either ethernet or wireless. For info on how to share a hard drive look here (technical version) and here (simplified version). There have been reports of problems sharing USB hard drives where the ’share’ feature is lost after a reboot of the host computer. My tests using a host and client (laptop ) both running Windows XP however showed that the host did keep the USB hard drive shared even after a reboot, and the client computer had no problems accessing it.

USB hard drive network adapters - Another option is to use a device that can turn USB dri into NAS devices, but most appear to have some short comings. These range from inability to handle drives larger than 250 gb, to inability to read or write NTFS file systems, and may even require you to reformat the USB drive with a Linux file system. You definitely don’t want to do that as it will make the drive unusable should you want to simply plug it back into your Windows computer. This is still emerging technology so verify that your USB hard drive will work with the adapter before buying.

Network Attached Storage - If you are starting from scratch your best bet to minimize potential problems is to get a network ready hard drive, also known as NAS, which are starting to become more common. These can be plugged into any network switch and essentially act like another computer on your network. Typically you will need to install software which comes with the hard drive on every computer that will be accessing it. You should install only what’s absolutely necessary and opt out of all the other things they want you to install, which usually are outdated versions of something you probably already have (Adobe Reader for example), or trial ware which will start pestering you in short order to buy the full version.

Note that some NAS hard drives have a USB connection which allows you connect USB drive into the network drive in a piggyback arrangement. The diagram below shows typical configurations for either a shared USB hard drive or a NAS drive.