Hey. I recently made a separate user account on my mac, because I want to keep all of my remote work files and processes in a different space to my personal stuff. When it gets quiet, though, I like to do a few flashcards. My media folder is huge, so naturally I don’t want two instances of this on my harddrive. I’ve tried giving my work account permission to access my main library (and anki folder), then starting anki using ‘open /Applications/Anki.app --args -b ~/Users/[my name]/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2’, but this hasn’t worked…it just comes up with a new profile and no data. If anyone could help me, I would be very grateful…it seems like it shouldn’t be too difficult to share profiles across users, but I’ve spent so long searching and this was the best shot that I had.
From the manual:
“Profiles are primarily intended to be used by different people, and are not recommended for splitting up your own content. If you have created multiple profiles for yourself, the best option is to merge them into a single profile. You can do so by exporting one deck from profile A, and then importing it into profile B, repeating for any other decks in profile A, until everything is in profile B.”
Hi cqg, I’m afraid that’s a different thing to what I’m doing here. I only have one profile, for one person. I have read the manual pretty thoroughly, but there is nothing about this in there.
Ah, sorry, I read your post too fast 
Sorry, I realise looking back now that it wasn’t super clear what I’m doing! Thank you for looking.
Just to explain better for everyone:
I have two accounts on my mac. I could login to my ankiweb account and sync for both, but then I would have two massive folders on the same computer with the exact same data in them. I’m trying to set up anki so that it can just access the same folder 
You probably want to use links. I am not a Mac user, so I’m unsure about the details, but the big picture should be the following:
Your Anki data is kept somewhere were both accounts can read/write. It is likely possible to change file permissions to enable both account to read/write your existing Anki data, without moving it.
On the other account, you create a link that points to the existing data, named like the anki directory.
Just a word of warning: I don’t think opening two instances of Anki sharing data is a good idea.
Maybe the running user doesn’t have permission to read or write to the files in the other user’s folder. I would not recommend sharing a base folder; it’s not a use case Anki tries to support, and you could end up causing problems with parallel access or permission issues. it would be safer to either keep your Anki on one user account, or have both users store their own copy, and rely on syncing to keep them in sync.