Photo organization across multiple Macs?

Not sure where this question was best placed?

We are looking for some ideas on how to best organize / manage access to photo across three computers. While I would like to avoid using a cloud-based service, I;m wondering if that may be the best option? i.e., Apple cloud for Photos...

Our family currently has 3 Mac's
My MacBook Pro - most of te photo editing etc is done on this computer. I typically download most of the photos from my Canon onto this computer.
My wifes iMac - she likes to have access to the photos to put into calendars, etc
The "family" MacBook Pro - hardly any photos get downloaded here.

I have a couple of 3TB "My Book" and "My Cloud" hard drives that I back-up onto, but it can be slow to access them and organization of the files makes it harder to find things.

As an aside, I have Adobe Photoshop CS5. I'm thinking of adding either LightRoom (standalone) or the Cloud version... Not sure if the cloud version will help with finding images from my computer if my wife wants them...

Thanks!

After you work the photos on your pro what do you do with them?

If you move those to a drive, I would connect that drive to your wifes iMac and share it on the network. This way the other macbook and yours can connect to that drive and find older images. Current stuff would be worked on your macbook. Since you dont use LR on your macbook there is no reason to change your workflow. But once you are done you can then import them to LR on your wifes iMac. She can find whatever she needs there. The 3rd mac however cannot launch LR from a networked drive so they would have to be a finder lookup.

Another alternative is this: since you have macs you can use the photo app. You dont have to have it set to the iCloud sync if you dont want. Then you can open that iCloud library from any of the macs on the network. There arent as many options in the photo app such as meta data editing, etc but its free so there is the trade off.

Thanks for taking the time to respond!
Currently, after working on the images on my MacBook, I backup to a MyBook HD - my wife can then connect to it to.
We have a My Book cloud drive as well, but it seems rather slow (even though it's hooked up to a router).
Any hints or links on how to set up Photos in Mac without having to use icloud?
Is it just through the wireless in the house?

i may just have to start plugging the hard drive into her computer more regularly and uploading the images to her computer - then we'd have triple backup of images...

I plan to get LR soon, so that may help with organization of images.

My thought is this. Connect the MyBook HD to your wifes iMac and then set it to sharing. You do your edits and then send them to that drive that is shared. This is of course temporary because once you start in on LR its a whole other beast. The issue being that you cannot use LR with shared HD, it has to be a direct connected drive. Lr is really meant to be used with one computer at a time unless you want to do a bunch of drive shuttling.

I downloaded and installed the Mac OS Server app from the apple App Store then shared out the folders with the file sharing functionality included with the app. The file sharing is quick, and very configurable.

Thanks for the tip, I'm looking into the OS server idea.

My current plan, now that I have the 7D2, is I set it up to store RAW on the CF and high res JPG on the SD.
I will download the RAW images on my laptop - and will likely be using LightRoom.
My wife will download the JPGS to her computer and she can post, etc from Mac Photos.

Once I'm done culling the RAW images, I'll save the keepers as jpgs and send to my wife.
All images will be backed up on 1 or 2 hard-drives.

Hopefully this way, she'll be happy that she at least has copies of all shots I take.

Once I get LightRoom, I'm sure I'll have TONS more questions, but will post that when the time comes!