Can iPhoto access its Photo Library if it is located on an external hard drive?
I have a MacBook (white, about 4 years old) and the hard drive is full, mostly of photos my iPhoto Library file is huge and I have two young children so I am taking lots of photos and will be taking more of course but I can't fit them on my computer and I'm not buying a new computer just for more space when I have a perfectly good G-Drive with over 200 GB of space. Is there a way to move (permanently and not just a copy) iPhoto's photo library to the external drive and then have iPhoto access the drive to store and retrieve the photos from this location? Just to be clear I'm not talking about backing it up I want to move the iPhoto Library to the external drive so my laptop isn't always full and so everything is on the external where there is plenty of room. Is this possible?
Yes.
Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
Regards
TD
Similar Messages
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Is there a way to access my iTunes Library, which is stored on a (PC) External Hard Drive, on a MacBook Air (through an Apricorn Universal Hard Drive Adapter), without transferring the music files off of the external hard drive?
In other words, because the MacBook Air only has 120 gbs of hard drive space & my old hard drive, from a Lenovo, has 500 gbs of hard drive space (and I have over 120 gbs of music), I’m looking to manage my iTunes music from the external hard drive permanently. Upon attempting to access the iTunes library held on the external hard drive the following message comes up: “The iTunes Library.itl file is locked, on a locked disk, or you do not have write permission for this file”. Is there a way to get around this?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks so much!You will have to engage a split library which means you will have to start answering questions on this forum because you will need to learn a lot about how iTunes works in order not that have a big mess at the end of it all. It also won't be easy when the time comes to relocate it all to different drives.
You can go to advanced preferences and turn off organize media and copy to items to media folder when adding items to library. Next read about how to selectively consolidate items to the external drive.
Sept. 2010, Consolidate selected content - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2589812 and April 2014, https://discussions.apple.com/message/25414357
"...selected the new tracks directly in iTunes, Control-clicked on the selection, and saw that now you can consolidate selected items." - http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090919000326840
Remember that when you start iTunes without the external drive turned on iTunes will present you with a bunch of broken links. If you have automatic downloads enabled with iCloud you may have to turn that off to prevent iTunes from repopulating your drive trying to deal with those "missing" tracks.
If you add tracks in bunches to iTunes and want them to go to different media folders you will need to either add them by holding down the option key while dragging if the desired media folder is not the one set in preferences, or by changing the media folder in preferences. Changing media folder preferences only applies to new files added, not old ones.
Okay, I am going to stop typing because you might just reply to me, "Oh, okay, forget it," and I don't need the exercise.
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391 -
Can I and how do I transfer my Itunes location to an external hard drive...
My computer it running out of space mainly because of my itunes library. A couple of questions. Can I transfer the location of the library and account to an external hard drive and how can I do this so the default will be the external hard drive and not my computer? (Side note - I am using a portable Seagate external hard drive for this.) Thank you for you assistance with this.
Right-click any song in iTunes, locate it in the Windows Explorer, navigate up to the iTunes folder, drag it over, launch iTunes with the Shift key held down, and point it there.
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I'm using Iphone 6 just now and I can't access my photo library at whatsapp
I'm using Iphone 6 just now and I can't access my photo library at whatsapp
I turned on and off home sharing and it recognised the photo album.
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I opened my iPhoto library today which was stored on an external hard drive and several of my videos now will not play at all. The weird thing is that each file shows a duration of 1 second and when I open them it just shows one frame. What the !&%$#@ Where did my original video files go?
Sounds like a good plan, you can never be to safe and having a second External HD is safer than one.
The only thing that I would do different, is setup the 3T as my TimeMachine Backup and then erase and move my Photos, Videos and perhaps even iTunes Media to the 1T. That way you will have room to backup both the Internal Hard Drive and the 1T External Hard Drive to the 3T using TimeMachine.
Take your time, study and use the > Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions if you get stuck or aren't sure how to make the move.
Also see > iPhoto: How to move the Library folder to a new location
iMovie ’08: Storing or moving your video library to an external hard disk
and > iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder -
how do i copy photos still in their events folders from my macbook to my imac? also can i back up my photos still in their events folders to an external hard drive?
how do i copy photos still in their events folders from my macbook to my imac? also can i back up my photos still in their events folders to an external hard drive?
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how do you export your iphoto library from a mac air to an external hard drive to free up space on the mac air
Go to Pictures folder and copy the library to the external drive. Then, open iPhoto holding Option key and select the library in your external disk. Finally, delete the library on Pictures
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Finding iphoto (located in an external hard drive) in Bridge
How do I open (or find) iphoto, that I have located in my external hard drive, through Bridge? I can see all the other things that I have in my EH, but not iphoto.
You can't, iPhoto uses a package file for it's library and neither Finder nor Bridge can show this content directly.
The two applications can't be mixed together, iPhoto as said uses a library structure and Bridge is a file browser reflecting the content in the folders of your user account or attached drives etc.
Also most edit settings (ACR etc) on raw files can't be exchanged between the two because they use different engines.
If you want the files from iPhoto to show in Bridge you have to export them first to a folder outside of iPhoto.
There is a way to make it a bit more easy.
Create a folder on your system and give it a proper name. Then open a new finder window and in column mode select pictures / iPhoto library. Here you see an icon of a stack of images.
click once on this icon to select it, then use right mouse click and from the menu choose 'show package content'
This opens a new window. Inhere is depending on version a folder called 'Masters' or 'originals'
Be sure to COPY the content (not move because then you loose the originals in iPhoto, you don't want that to happen) and after copy close the package content window (don't mess around with packages, just copy and close) open bridge and point Bridge to the newly created folder using the folder panel.
In menu view choose 'show items from subfolders' and let Bridge take its time to build the cache of all images in that main folder. Wait for the activity bar bottom left to finish completely.
Now you have all originals in a folder structure. Either keep this structure or create on of your own. You can also batch rename all files using shot date (yyymmdd and sequence number or other addition) to create a natural sort order for your files. It is all up to you and your custom wishes -
I had a windows laptop, and I save files like photos,documents, videos and other things on an external hard drive, and now I want tomove those files to the Mac book Pro, and then move those files again toanother external hard drive 1T. My question is: Is it possible? Doing this willnot affect the files that I had in windows? No information is lost? or how cani do it?
Connect the external drive to your Mac and drag the files from it to your Mac's internal drive. Then dismount and disconnect the external drive, connect the 1TB external drive, and drag the files from the internal drive onto the external. Nothing will have been deleted from any of the drives up to this point; the files will only have been copied. Verify that the files are readable. There's no reason they shouldn't be; this is just a precaution.
Now if you wish to delete the files from any of the drives, drag them to the Trash, and Empty the Trash while the drive from which they came is still connected. If you disconnect the drive before emptying the Trash, the files you were trying to remove from it won't be deleted. They'll remain in the Trash and continue to take up space on the drive.
Note that if your external drives are in NTFS format, you won't be able to write anything to them or delete anything from them, though you will be able to read and copy the files they contain. The NTFS disk format is read-only to the Mac OS, unless you have a third-party NTFS driver installed. To make your drives cross-platform readable and writable, you must reformat them in the FAT32 or ExFAT format. -
Can I back up my Mac and my pc to the same external hard drive? If so, could you explain how? Thanks. I am a new user with mountain lion.
You could partition the drive into 2 partitions. One formatted as HFS+ for Mac OS X back, and one formatted as NTFS for Windows backup.
You would have to move the drive from system to system to do your backups. If there are 2 systems, I would suggest just getting separate drives for each, unless they are both laptops, then you will be disconnecting the drives all the time anyway.
Unless Windows is running in a virtual machine on your Mac. Then a partitioned drive would be fine. -
My Mac Book hard drive is nearly full. How do I move iTunes music, etc folders to a different location on an external hard drive and still access as if on my Mac?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449
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I had to reformat my OSX 10.5.8 and I can't restore my emails from my time machine backup from an external hard drive - only the latest (post backup) time machine back ups are available to restore. Please can any help? I can find the mail folder in my libraries, but the Restore Button is grayed out
OSX treats the reformatted drive as a different one; it's the same as replacing it, and the old one is no longer connected.
See #E3 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting to see and restore from the "old" drive.
And, you may not want to restore via the Finder; see the blue box in #15 of Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions. -
Can anyone help me figure out how to use my new LaCie external hard drive to import movies from my camcorder into imovie '09? I ran into so many problems last night!! Was up way past my bedtime!
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