How do I relocate part of my home folder onto another drive

Hi all
I am about to take delivery of my new Mac Pro, but with only 512MB of startup SSD I don't have room for my whole home folder. I have found plenty of info online about moving my whole home folder onto another drive, but as my external drive is only USB3 I don't want to do that. Instead I want to move my Movies and Pictures folders only and then tell my system to forget about the old location and treat the new location as though it is the home folder just for those two bits.
Sure I can just copy them over and delete the old folder contents, but as soon as I want to do something like save a pic or movie the system defaults to the old empty location.
It's not the end of the world, but if I can fix it, I'd like to. The plan is to sort this on my current Mac Mini before the new toy arrives, so I can easily set up the new one.
All guidance gratefully received.
Regards
Tim

Hello,
You can use some basic unix wizardry to make this happen. What you will be doing is creating a unix "soft link" from your home directory to the actual location of the directories, wherever they may be. This link serves as a "behind-the-scenes redirect" to the actual location to which you link. For example, with the soft link in place, if you
Here's what you do:
Use Finder to move your directories of choice from your home directory to the external HDD. This will require your admin password. Now you should see the folders on your external HDD, and NOT in your home folder. For purposes of this procedure, I will assume your external HDD is named "Storage". Wherever you see "Storage" in the following steps, replace it with the actual name of your external HDD.
Open the Terminal app.
From the command prompt, type the following commands (with a <return> after each) to create a soft link (in this example we are using the "Movies" folder. The "Movies" folder must have been moved in Step 1 to the external HDD):
cd
ln -s /Volumes/Storage/Movies Movies
Repeat the "ln -s" command for each folder that you have moved in Step 1.
Here's what's happening in Step 3:
The "cd" command just ensures that you are in your home directory.
The "ln -s" command creates a link from the external HDD directory, to a directory in your present location (i.e., your home directory)
There is one side affect that I don't know how to get around. Once you do this, the icon that shows up for the "Movies" folder in your home directory will no longer be the fancy system icon for the Movies folder. It will be a vanilla folder icon, with an curved arrow. The curved arrow is a visual indication that the file/folder is link to somewhere else.
Hope this helps.

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Message was edited by: acosmichippo54

acosmichippo54 wrote:
ok, after reviewing those tips, these problems still bug me:
Macyourself: +"Any time you want to add a new movie or TV show to your library, move it over to the appropriate folder on your external hard drive, hold Option, and drag it to iTunes.+
i agree this involves a little more +user interaction+ but once you get into a routine, it is really quite simple to manage. for example, i keep all my *Apple Lossless* tunes on an external USB drive. i add newly ripped CD's to that external, then option drag the folder into iTunes and have iTunes convert those tunes to AAC 256 (which are thus kept in the main library).
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