Apologies if this has been addressed before.

I have an MBP and an imac on my home network. I would like to have one folder on the imac available to the MBP solely (this would mitigate the need for pwd protecting the folder?). Can't seem to figure it out. Am able to make a single folder available to everyone, but cannot make it available to a single user on the MBP. I've added the folder to the "shared folders" column in settings/sharing; then added the MBP's user under "Users". Doesn't work. Thanks.

You can't restrict sharing to a particular machine, but you can require a login and password (and restrict which users can login to it). Note, unless you use OS X Server, you'll have to login with user credentials from the iMac.

So I would first login on the imac with the user I normally use on the MBP; then returning to the MBP I would be able to access the shared folder on the imac?

I think you're confusing the system login and the file sharing login. If you want to connect to a file share on another computer, you have to login to your system first, and then to the file share.

Not to sound rude, but the Syst Pref 'Sharing' has some nice helpful Help guides on file sharing, and may I suggest that once the shared folder is setup as needed and mounted on the other Mac, is to make an alias of it for quick access and mounting the next time it's needed.

If this is for yourself, just use the finder to connect to the imac under your imac account. If you save this login in the keychain of the remote computer, you're one click away and have access to everything, not just one folder.

If this is for someone else, you already have a Public folder which can be used to share files, however, login information will always be required unless it's a guest account, which I think is not what you want.

A much more sophisticated set up might include messing around with directory and file permissions and creating new 'groups' where only members of a certain group have access to a directory. This is no longer easy in SnowLeopard and it could be dangerous enough to hose your system if you make a mistake.

Thanks - this is what I need.