How do I migrate my iphoto and itunes libraries to an external hard drive, then point the programs to read them from that location?

Hi, do you know how I can migrate my iphoto and itunes libraries from my over-filled laptop to an external hard drive then point the programs to read from that location instead? I'm trying to make some space available on this old computer

To move iTunes...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449?viewlocale=en_US
...and iPhoto.....
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1229

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Can I store iPhoto and iTunes libraries on an external hard disk?

I have a Mac Book Pro with Retina Display that I bought new in late 2014.
It has 250GB of storage but apparently I am already running out of space already.
I want to know if I can store my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on an external drive to help free up space.
Also, when I get the breakdown of space used on my internal storage, it shows "photos, audio, movies," etc and how much each category takes up. But for some reason "Other" takes up nearly half of my hard drive. Is there a way I can find out what "Other" files I have that I might be able to delete to reduce the size on my internal disk?

1. Yes. Drag the libraries there, launch the applications with the Option key held down, and choose those libraries; the iPhoto one needs to be stored on a drive, partition, or disk image formatted as Mac OS Extended.
2. Click here for information. If desired, run a tool such as GrandPerspective.
(123835)

How do you use home sharing if Itunes library is on external hard drive?

How do you set up home sharing if IPhoto and Itunes libraries are on external hard drive?

You might want to start with a new instandce of iTunes - instructions on how to do this is on the web depending on whether you're running Windows or Appls Software. The below URL is one site you can use.
http://ipod.about.com/od/advanceditunesuse/ss/Multiple-Itunes-Libraries-One-Comp uter.htm
Set up your iTunes to utilize the music files on your external Hard Drive.
On iTunes pull down menu select Preferences.
Click on the advanced tab and set the iTunes Media Folder location to your External HD
Click on the File pull down menu and import the folder containing your music into iTunes.
Turn on Home Sharing on your computer - Click on the File pull down menu and click on Home Sharing.
Turn on Home Sharing on your other device(s)
On Music on iPad or iPhone, tap on the More tab and if you set things up right, you will see your Library name. Click on this and if things go as they should, it will connect to your library and you will see your albums, artists, playlists, sogs etc.
Good luck.

How Can I Migrate My Time Machine Backups To A New External Hard Drive?

I have a external hard drive that has 500 GBs left, but I want to buy a larger drive.

ivan wrote:
How Can I Migrate My Time Machine Backups To A New External Hard Drive?
I have a external hard drive that has 500 GBs left, but I want to buy a larger drive.
Hi iVain
Fire up *Disk Utility*, click the Restore tab, then drag your old and new TM drives into the Source and Destination fields. Click Restore, and a complete copy of your old TM files will be made on the new drive. Go to TM preferences and select the new drive, and it will continue backing up just as it left off.
Hope this answers your question. See:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2595485&tstart=0

I have been storing my Aperture and IMovie Libraries on an external hard drive that recently died. Fortunately I've been using Time Machine to back up to a 2nd external drive. How do I restore my libraries to a new external hard drive?

I have been storing my Aperture and IMovie Libraries on an external hard drive that recently died. Fortunately I've been using Time Machine to back up to a 2nd external drive. How do I restore my libraries to a new external hard drive?

This is a tricky one.
Open up Time Machine and go back to a date using the timeline on the right side of the window when you know the drive was working and was backing up as part of Time Machine backups.
Click on the name of your Mac under the Devices heading on the left side of the window in Time Machine, and if things are working correctly you will see Macintosh HD (or whatever you have named it) and the name of the external hard drive that was backing up in the past.
Right-Click on the name of the external hard drive and then click on "Restore (name of drive) to....." You may be asked for your adminstrator password at this point.
It might be easier to restore the drive contents to your desktop if you have room on your Mac, and then copy things over to the new external drive where you want to store the Aperture and iMovie Libraries.
Once the libraries have been moved over the new external hard drive, you will likely need to "point" Aperture and iMovie to the location of the libraries on the new external hard drive.

How can I back up multiple itunes libraries to an external hard drive?

How can I back up multiple itunes libraries to an external hard drive? I have tried dragging them across but they all open up as the primary library.

See this -> https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2682

Hey, can i clone my Macbook Pro internal hard drive and then paste it all onto a formated external hard drive, then make the Mac use the external as the primary hard drive?

hey, can i clone my Macbook Pro internal hard drive and then paste it all onto a formated external hard drive, then make the Mac use the external as the primary hard drive? please help for i only have around 618mb left out of 189GB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If what doesn't work?
If cloning your internal drive to the external drive is not successful, I expect CCC will tell you so. Assuming that doesn't happen, you will have a bootable replica of the internal drive on the external drive once CCC has finished.
You can then do any of several things:
1. Replace your internal drive with a much larger one (320GB or 500GB, or even larger), and clone the external drive's contents onto the new drive so you'll have all your data in one place. Note that if you do this, you'll also need to buy an external drive that's large enough to back the new internal drive up on.
2. Boot from the external drive as a temporary measure while you clear at least 30-40GB of data off the internal drive, allowing you to keep using it and saving small amounts of data to it. The external drive will then contain the only copies of the files you've deleted from the internal drive, so you'll need a seond external drive large enough to back both the other drives up on.
If you can't comfortably clear a minimum of 30GB off the internal drive, you really need a larger internal drive right now, and you shouldn't bother fooling around with the inadequate one you have — you'll just quickly overfill it again.
3. Replace the optical drive in your MBP with a large conventional hard drive, giving you two hard drives inside the machine. You will then need one or more external drives large enough to back up both of the internal drives.
If you sense a theme here — back up, back up, back up — you are correct. It's flat-out foolhardy to own or use a computer without maintaining complete, up-to-date backups of everything at all times.

How do I copy an iPhoto library, which is on an external hard drive, onto a new external hard drive?

I'm running out of space on my external hard drive, so I was advised to buy one with triple the amount of space. So, I need to copy my current iphoto library, which is on an external hard drive, onto a new external hard drive. I thought I could just drag and drop it in, but that doesn't seem to be working.

Make sure the external drive is formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled) and then drag the iPhoto Library to that drive using the Finder.
Then double click the library in its new location to open it in iPhoto. Test it thoroughly, if it is working, before deleting the original library on the internal drive.
To check the format of the drive, see (it says Aperture, but the same applies to iPhoto): Format external drives to Mac OS Extended before using with Aperture
iPhoto: Issues with FAT32-formatted drives

Moving Iphoto and Go Pro videos to external hard drive to free up memory on my MAC

Hi,
My Mac memory is nearly full, mostly from Go Pro Videos and photos, I have dragged my iphoto library to my 1TB external hard drive but when I go to delete from my iphoto library it also deletes from the iphoto on the external hard drive? I am looking to keep Iphoto and Go Pro vids on my external to free up space on the MAC, but want to access and edit them as normal when the external hard drive is plugged in?
Many thanks

Hi klatham15,
Thank you for visiting Apple Support Communities.
It sounds like you want to move your iPhoto Library to your external hard drive so you can remove it from your internal drive and free up internal hard drive space.
Please make sure you have followed the steps in this article and "re-linked" iPhoto to the new location.
iPhoto: How to move the Library folder to a new location - Apple Support
Of course when it is properly pointing to the external hard drive, deleting content from iPhoto will delete it from the external drive.
Take care,
Nubz

How to transfer iphoto and itunes libraries from NAS back to MacBook Pro

I recently upgraded my MBP hard drive, and decided I'd like to move my iphoto and itunes libraries back to my local drive from my Synology NAS. I thought this would be easily achieved by copying the libraries from the NAS and pasting them in the desired locations in the MBP, as I did to get them to the NAS in the first place. This will not work.
First off, when I try a simple copy and paste through finder, the transfer gets about half way through and suddenly stops with "You can't copy "iPhoto Library" because it has the same name as another item in the destination volume, and that volume doesn't distinguish between upper- and lowercase letters in filenames".
This occurs even if there is no Iphoto directory currently on the MBP.
I contacted Synology, and they attempted to have me use a windows transfer protocol to transfer the libraries, but when transferring this way I am stopped half way through with an "Error -8084" code.
I am aware that the MBP is formatted with MAC OS Extended (Journaled), and that the NAS is formatted differently, but there must be some way to get this back.
My itunes library contains all my family's ipad, and iphone back ups, in addition to around 35 gb of music. Additionally, I don't want to lose Event info in Iphoto.
Please help!
Thank you

Have you read for possible solutions over in the "More Like This" thread over here?----------------------->

How can I transfer and operate my 2tb itunes library to an external hard drive?

How can I transfer and operate my 1.8tb itunes library to an external hard drive?

Drag the entire library there, launch iTunes with the Option key held down, and choose it.
(114893)

I saved my itunes account to an external hard drive and can no longer access it

i have saved my itunes account to an external hard drive, then deleted my account on my laptop to make space on my hard drive and can no longer get acces to my itunes account.

If you move/copy your data back to internal drive, you should be able to add it to library, by clicking file add to library at the top of itunes.

HT1751 when I try to drag my Itunes into my external hard drive, I get the "no way" symbol, circ;e with a line thjrough it. How can I back up? I have lost a fortune in purchased items because I cannot back up despite following the Unhelpful help.

I cannot drag my Itunes folder to my external hard drive, despite following the unhelpful help exactly. I get a "no way" sign Circle with a line though it. I have lost a fortune in purchased goods (audio books) because I cant do it. Itunes have said they cant reimburse me and they dont have those books anymore, so cannot redownload them for me. Please remind me NEVER to buy apple products again.
I am scared I am going to lose more money seeing I cant BACK ANYTHING UP.

If you used the hard drive with another Mac then it is likely Mac formatted. It was because you posted in the iTunes for Windows forum (kind of the equivalent to taking a VW to a Ford dealership for service) I thought you might be using a Windows formatted drive.
Thumb drives are not universal. There isn't a "universal" drive format. Some work partly with both systems but are not fully compatible.
Click once on the hard drive icon on the desktop. Fo to File then Get Info. It will say the drive format.
Frankly I have never had your problem with a drive so I can't help too much except in general experience. The prohibitory sign is pretty universal and for some reason you are not allowed to copy to that drive.
I think if you had a Windows computer you'd be unhappy with it too and probably be posting on a forum that your machine was virus ridden and crashing and you didn't know anything about registries... To be honest, I was doing a presentation on a friend's Windows computer and wanted to get it to display a simple image file. There was no way we could get the .jpg image file to open with anything but Windows Explorer which is a web browser! I mean, that's really bad, and of course he was so used to using it without knowing anything about computers that he could not help me. I did my presentation in front of 30 people using Explorer.

ITunes Music on an External Hard Drive

Sometime ago I put, or as you will see, thought I'd put, all my itunes music on an external hard drive, I used the instructions as outlined on the Apple website, and it all SEEMED to work fine, except that when I choose "organise library" or as it used to be known "consolidate", itunes copies about 300 or so tracks and thats it, but I have over 10,000 songs, vids and podcasts. Also if I go into Spotlight/Finder, there are a lot of iTunes files on BOTH the external hard drive AND in the itunes folder on the INTERNAL hard drive, now I'm worried about copying one from the other in case I lose some stuff, any ideas?

apple-lovin-it wrote:
Sometime ago I put, or as you will see, thought I'd put, all my itunes music on an external hard drive, I used the instructions as outlined on the Apple website, and it all SEEMED to work fine, except that when I choose "organise library" or as it used to be known "consolidate", itunes copies about 300 or so tracks and thats it, but I have over 10,000 songs, vids and podcasts. Also if I go into Spotlight/Finder, there are a lot of iTunes files on BOTH the external hard drive AND in the itunes folder on the INTERNAL hard drive, now I'm worried about copying one from the other in case I lose some stuff, any ideas?
check if iTunes is pointed to the desired location in preferences > advanced like so

Is there a way I can edit pictures in Lightroom 5 on my mac and be able to switch to my pc if I have my catalog and my pictures on an external hard drive?

Hi,
I have a MacBook Pro and I also have a Wacom Cintiq companion and I would like to be able to edit my pictures on both the computers. I prefer using my mac but sometimes, when I need to be more precise with my editing, I like to use my Wacom Cintiq companion. I followed the steps to install my catalog and pictures on an external hard drive, then added the ''Folder'' of pictures in both computers but the problem I have is that since a PC and a Mac doesn't read the hard drive ''root'' the same way, it creates a second folder on my mac that I can't have access and I am not able to edit pictures on one computer and keep them on the other computer.
Can someone help me??
Here is an exemple of what I get ...

Contact the Apple account security team for your country and request assistance: Apple ID: Contacting Apple for help with Apple ID account security. If you can prove your identity to them, they can reset the password and help you regain control of the account.

How do I migrate my iphoto and itunes libraries to an external hard drive, then point the programs to read them from that location?

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