Managing Large iBooks Library

I have a large number of epubs / pdfs on my Mac (around 1,000) and I sync perhaps 100 of those at any one time to my iPad and maybe 20 to my iPhone. Whenever I go into iTunes to add more books to a device the list in the Books tab of the iPad proves hugely frustrating. Scrolling down through all of those books is time-consuming and made more so by the fact that every so often it just bounces back up to the top for no reason. Is there a better way of deciding which books from a large library are to be synced? This problem persists in every version of iTunes I've used.

All you can do is send feedback to Apple to let them know that the UI doesn't work for large collections.
Michi.

Similar Messages

Managing large iTunes library across multiple storage devices

Greetings,
I'm trying to find a way to manage a very large library of about 1 TB, which obviously won't fit on my MBP hard drive. I want my movies and tv shows on an external drive, but would like my music, podcasts, etc on my internal drive. I would like to ability to see all items when in iTunes, and would like the ability synch any of the items when synching my iPods, iPhone, or iPad.
I know I can go into the preferences and select the advanced tab and deselect the Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library and then put my media on an external storage device.
My question is this... when I download new movie or tv shows from iTunes, where will it put them? Will it put them in my iTunes media folder, or will it put them on the external drive, or someplace else?
Wouldn't it be easier if Apple would allow you to designate where you wanted to put your videos versus or audo content? it just seems so "unintuitive" for a company that prides themselves on being easy to use, and of course, "just working"
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance... Scott

iTunes hasn't really caught up with Apple's seeming trend towards devices that are smaller and smaller and the glut of media that requires large storage. I guess in the end it might be expected one goes to cloud storage of some sort.
I have never bought anything from iTunes Store but I guess it will still download to someplace indicated in preferences for your media folder location even if you have turned off copy to for other methods of adding media. Two options then. Either make that place your internal drive and move files to the external as you download them, or make it the external drive and work with special handling of music files on the internal. You can override iTunes copying items if you hold down the option key while dragging the item to itunes.

Best way to manage large photo library

I currently use iPhoto to manage my 14,000+ images, but I am experiencing a few problems with it and wonder if ALR is a better alternative. My computer is running more and more slowly every time I add more to the library. I am worried it will crash the computer or make other applications inoperable, but am not sure what is the best way for me to manage the library.
My concerns are:
1. I have the files backed up on an external drive, but I don't want to also remove them from iPhoto because (I think) I will lose the captions I have entered for each image and the folders in which they are organized.
2. I want to increase my library of images (plus captions) and allow it to be utilized in the near future by others at my workplace by putting the library, I suppose, on an external hard drive. Can that work with ALR?
Thank you, in advance, for suggestions.

Elisaa,
LR2 is a much better storage and retrieval system than iPhoto. Plus, the LR2 editing features are simple and powerful. iPhoto has a file size threshold that is much lower than LR2.
My LR2 database is 122,000 images (has been 150k) and does just fine.
Other users are problematic with LR2; it is a single computer application with no network capabiity. Yes, you can have the database on an external drive and pass it around, but that kind of thing would not be convenient.
Chris Crumley http://chriscrumley.com

I have an iPad 2 with iOS 5.1 and iBooks version 2.1.1. I have 64GB of storage, 80% is used. iBooks is using 250MB of storage. I have a large number of PDF files in my iBooks library. At this time I can not add another book or PDF file to my library.

I have an iPad 2 with iOS 5.1 and iBooks version 2.1.1. I have 64GB of storage, 80% is used. iBooks is using 250MB of storage. I have a large number of PDF files in my iBooks library. At this time I can not add another book or PDF file to my library. When I try to move a PDF file to iBooks the system works for a while...sometimes the file appears and than disappears....sometimes the file never appears. Is ther some limit to the number of books or total storage used in IBooks? Thanks....

Hi jybravo70,
Welcome to the Apple Support Communities!
It sounds like you may be experiencing issues on your non iOS 8 devices because iOS 8 is required to set up or join a Family Sharing group.
The following information is located in the print at the bottom of the article.
Apple - iCloud - Family Sharing
Family Sharing requires a personal Apple ID signed in to iCloud and iTunes. Music, movies, TV shows, and books can be downloaded on up to 10 devices per account, five of which can be computers. iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are required to set up or join a Family Sharing group and are recommended for full functionality. Not all content is eligible for Family Sharing.
Have a great day,
Joe

Managing a large iphoto library

There's plenty of discussion on this topic but im not sure there is a clear winner on the best way to manage a large iphoto library stored on an external hard drive across a MacBook Air and an ipad. Ideally I want to have all my photos on the ipad for viewing and sharing, reduced file size is fine, and be able to sync with my latest photos that are to be uploaded on the mac book air.
I have aperture, and currently have my library split so old photos are on the external drive and newest ones on the macbook air. This gets around the fact i cant fit my full library on the air However, this means I can't sync with the ipad without erasing the older photos not currently in the MacBook Air.
One idea I read about was to store the originals on the harddrive and only thumbnails on the MacBook Air allowing all photos to be stored in a sync-able library. However I'm worried that splitting out the originals will mess with the library.
Any suggestions much appreciated

One idea I read about was to store the originals on the harddrive and only thumbnails on the MacBook Air allowing all photos to be stored in a sync-able library. However I'm worried that splitting out the originals will mess with the library.
I have no idea where you read this but it is not possible with iPhoto - it is with Aperature
generally the best idea for iPhoto is to keep interesting and recent photos on your MBA and the complete library on an EHD using iPhoto Library Manager - http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/ - to manage the libraries and move photos as needed
as to the iPad - best to ask in the iPad forum - you can not "share" an iPhoto library with an iPad - you can only share selected photos from the library - I would think you would do this from the complete library on the EHD
LN

How can I manage 1 iTunes library with 2 computers (not on same network)?

I have 1 very large iTunes library in which I am always adding/deleting/editing songs and 2 computers (1 home, 1 laptop). I would like to be able to manage my library with my laptop when I am away from home but also be able to see any changes I made next time I open iTunes on my home computer. I tried home sharing but this seems to be more for computers on the same network. My library is much too big for iCloud. Someone suggested I hold shift when I open iTunes to select a library but even though I can select the library file I want, it doesn't populate iTunes with my changes (or any music for that matter). I'm running XP with the latest version of iTunes (10.7.0.21). Thanks

This describes a work/home scenario. For home/away use, edit the library directly on the portable backup when away, then sync libraries on your return.
Sync iPod/iPad/iPhone with two computers
Although it isn't possible to sync an Apple device with two different libraries it is possible to sync with the same logical library from multiple computers. Each library has an internal ID and when iTunes connects to your iPod/iPad/iPhone it compares the local ID with the one the device normally syncs with. If they are the same you can go ahead and sync...
I have my library cloned to a small 1Tb USB drive which I can take between home & work. At either location I use SyncToy 2.1 to update the local copy with the external drive. Mac users should be able to find similar tools. I can open either of the local libraries or the one on the external drive and update the media content of my iPhone. The slight exception is Photos which normally connects to a specific folder on a specific machine, although that can easily be remapped to the current library if you create a "Photos" folder inside the iTunes Media folder so that syncing the iTunes folders keeps this up to date as well. I periodically sweep my library for new files & orphans with iTunes Folder Watch just in case I make changes at one location but then overwrite the library with a newer copy from the other. Again Mac users should be able to find similar tools.
As long as your media is organized within an iTunes Music or Tunes Media folder, in turn held inside the main iTunes folder that has your library files (whether or not you let iTunes keep the media folder organized) each library can access items at the same relative path from the library folder so the library can be at different drives/paths on different machines. This solution ensures I always have adequate backups of my library and I can update my devices whenever I can connect to the same build of iTunes.
When working with an iPhone earlier builds of iTunes would remove any file not physically present in the local library, even if there was an entry for it, making manual management practically redundant on the iPhone. This behavior has been changed but it will still only permit manual management with a library that has the correct internal ID. If you don't want to sync your library between machines on a regular basis just copy the iTunes Library.itl file from the current "home" machine to any other you want to use, then clean out the library entries and import the local content you have on that box.
tt2

How do I import a large iPhoto library into an iMac running Yosemite without losing the existing division of the library into albums?which file do I look for on the older Mac, running Snow Leopard?

Import of library

You don't import one library into another. Simply copy the library from the older Mac to the Pictures folder on iMac. If you already have a library on the iMac rename it first.
Next launch iPhoto on the new iMac with the Option key held down and select the newly copied library.
If you have photos in the original library on the iMac you can merge that library into the larger, copied library with the paid version of iPhoto Library Manager. Or if you also have Aperture 3.3 you can use it to merge the two libraries.

IMovie '11 slow to load at every launch (large iPhoto library to blame?)

I'm running 10.6.7 on a late 2010 13" macbook pro. I have a very large iphoto library (over 200GB) that is full of movies made with various digital cameras. I do have a casio AVI video codec installed into quicktime as a plugin, fyi, but all the movies and clips open fine within iPhoto when I double click them.
The first time I opened up iMovie it said that it needed to scan the iphoto library and then create thumbnails. This took several hours, but finally completed. When it finished, I could see all of my movies as events in the iPhoto Videos section of the Event Library within iMovie.
The problem I'm having is that every time I launch iMovie it takes 5 minutes or more to actually open up. The program launches and then I get the spinning beach ball. Opening activity monitor and shows iMovie as "unresponsive" and there is massive disk read activity for a long time. It seems like it's scanning my drive and looking at a LOT of the files. Gigabytes of data is read. After a while, it finally settles down and I can see all the events. All of my clips appear to play fine within iMovie. But it makes using the program somewhat an awful experience as everytime I open iMovie I have to wait such a long time.
I tried trashing the preference file for iMovie and it asked me to recreate all the iPhoto library thumbnails. But I was back to square one aftewards, the same thing... long, long startup time.
Any thoughts or helpful ideas would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

iMovie remembers which you worked with last time you used it. If this is your iPhoto Library it will load all the thumbnails from iPhoto.
To manage your movie clips yourself you can make "events" for them.
1) Make a new event from the File menu.
2) Drag in the clips from iPhoto to that event.
3) Wait until iMovie has made thumbnails for these clips only.
When you quit iMovie it will remember that you worked with this event the last time and it will only load those thumbnails. Much faster. And you can create a new event for the next batch of raw footage.
The downside of this is that you get some videos duplicated so you have them in both iPhoto and iMovie on your disk.

Quickly open of documents in a large document library

I would like to find a solution to be able to quickly open documents that are in a document library that contains sub folders.
I already discarded the file system, and generation of workspace because they have physical limitations. my document library is very large.
I'm sure there is a solution.
Thanks

Hi,
According to your post, my understanding is that you want to open of documents in a large document library.
If you install OWA, you can open the documents in the brower directly.
If you only install Office, you can open the documents without saving them.
However, you need to set Browser File Handling to select Permissive.
For more information, you can refer to:
Manage Office Web Apps (Installed on SharePoint 2010 Products)
SharePoint 2010 – How to open files that prompt for Save or Cancel
Best Regards,
Linda Li
Linda Li
TechNet Community Support

Large Aperture Library 250GB

Afternoon App,
I have a large 250GB Library for Aperture - which is currently backed up on my External hard drive via Time Machine.
Im looking to update my laptop Mac Pro 2012 to Mac Pro 2013 Retina - but as these come with SSD im never going to fit it all in with my current setup (Used 550GB) this runs off a Hybrid SSD and Normal Disc drive.
Question - I dont think you can upgrade the retina drive to a normal drive ? - if you can then this wouldnt be a problem as I would swop the two drives over.
Question 2 - If you cant and have to use SSD - then what is the best way for me to keep my libary in tact - ie one folder structure - but off load the orginal images onto a drive ? Im guessing this would be the way todo it' ?
If someone could help I would be really greatful ?
Mick

Hi Mick,
Swapping out an unused CD-ROM for a useful HDD is a good exchange. OWC can likely help you determine what you can do and what parts you need.
I run a mixed Library on my personal machine (rMBP w. 500 GB SSD, no second drive bay). People generally think that it's the Library that is either referenced or managed, but it is more properly each Image's Original that is referenced or managed. I keep my Library on my laptop's SSD, import all new files into it with managed Originals, and once every month or so relocate the Originals of any Images that are older then 45 days. So my Library functions as a kind of processing tube: files come in, they are indexed, they are adjusted to my needs, and then the files are moved to an external HD. The index, and the Previews, stay with the Library, which stays on my laptop. With some tweaking for portfolio Images and incomplete projects, this system works well for me.
Note, though, that bus speeds for external drives are no longer the bottleneck they used to be. IME, you lose nothing perceptible if you put your entire Library on an external drive connected via USB-3 (or, I assume, Thunderbolt).
Having your system files on a large SSD, and your Library on a second internal drive, is almost ideal for a laptop.
In all cases I recommend leaving 100 GB unused on your SSD. OS X and Aperture are good at using this "scratch" space.
HTH,
--Kirby.

I have three questions about managing my music library

Hello,
I have three questions about managing my music library, I hope you can help me with them:
1) Is there a limit of how many entries, songs, albums, art work, can iTunes handle? I have a hunch iTunes is like a database program and am curious about its capacity. I have two 2-TB drives and am wondering what is going to happen when I fill these two drives up. Other than disk space, what are iTunes limitations?
2) Talking about these two drives. How can I use both as a source for my iTunes library. Can I have two folders selected as the source of my library? I am not sure if I have enough disk space to hold all my music, but I do also have a 1TB almost empty drive is need be.
3) OK now comes te real question. I am sure that I have duplicates in my library and I sure would love to clean my library up.Possiby if I do get to clean it up, I can save some disk space and that is always a good thing. Any good techniques, software, techniques to follow while ripping music to help keep my library organized. Please be as detailed as you can.
Thanks and I can't wait to hear from you.
Waseem

Wassimn wrote:
Hello,
I have three questions about managing my music library, I hope you can help me with them:
1) Is there a limit of how many entries, songs, albums, art work, can iTunes handle? I have a hunch iTunes is like a database program and am curious about its capacity. I have two 2-TB drives and am wondering what is going to happen when I fill these two drives up. Other than disk space, what are iTunes limitations?
As far as I know you're going to run out of disc space before you hit any limits. Each object in iTunes has a 64-bit key to access it. That said as your library grows it will get less responsive as bigger indexes take exponentially longer to process.
2) Talking about these two drives. How can I use both as a source for my iTunes library. Can I have two folders selected as the source of my library? I am not sure if I have enough disk space to hold all my music, but I do also have a 1TB almost empty drive is need be.
iTunes wants to manage everything inside one big folder. Some idiosyncrasies with the way it manages things if you have to move to a new drive means it is best if you can stick to that plan. If your library grows larger then you'll have to take manual control of where some or all of your content is stored. I use a variation of a script called ConsolidateByMoving which you could adapt for your needs.
3) OK now comes te real question. I am sure that I have duplicates in my library and I sure would love to clean my library up.Possiby if I do get to clean it up, I can save some disk space and that is always a good thing. Any good techniques, software, techniques to follow while ripping music to help keep my library organized. Please be as detailed as you can.
When it comes to deduping I've written another script for that called DeDuper, see this thread for background.
And for some general tips on getting organized in iTunes see Grouping tracks into albums.
tt2

How do I import photos in my iBook Library to my G5 Library w/ album names?

I want to combine my iBook Library with my G5 Library.
They are connected via a wireless network.
What is the easist way to do this?
Thanks for the info
Len

Len:
Welcome to the Apple Discussions. The easiest way to do that would be with the paid version of iPhoto Library Manager. It can merge libraries while maintaining the album, keyword, and other organizational information. Otherwise, you'd have to burn one of the libraries to disk using the Share->Burn Disc menu option. If your library is small enough you could burn the entire library to one DVD and then mount that DVD with the other iPhoto library and copy those rolls, albums, etc. into the other library. Or you can do it by burning selected rolls or albums. There will be a problem with keywords as there's a bug in V5 that messes up the keywords when burning that way. You're best bet would be the iPhoto Library Manager method.

Restore ibooks library mac

I have had to put a new hard drive in my macbook so I restored it to my latest Time Machine backup. I also have a clone of the old hard drive on another external disk. I have had soooooooo many problems with this Time Machine restore, I am definitely changing my backup software from now on. Anyway, my iBooks Mac library didn't get transferred. I went into my old cloned drive and copied over the whole /Users/name/Library/Containers/BKAgentService to my new drive but iBooks still cant see that I have books there. When I open the application I get this:
I cant just redownload the books from itunes because they arent from there originally. Even if I go into the blank iBooks library and try to add all of my books to that, they just don't get added...
Preferrably I want to have a symlink to the ebook files and keep them on a separate drive. I tried doing this as well as having all of the files on the actual internal drive but neither way worked.
Any suggestions on how I can restore my library? Im thinking there must be another file outside of this BKAgentService folder that manages the library but I dont know where it would be...

Problems such as yours are sometimes caused by files that should belong to you but are locked or have wrong permissions. This procedure will check for such files. It makes no changes and therefore is not, in itself, a solution.
First, empty the Trash, if possible.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C:
find ~ $TMPDIR.. $ -flags +sappnd,schg,uappnd,uchg -o ! -user $UID -o ! -perm -600 $ 2>&- | wc -l | pbcopy
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear.
The output of the command will be a number. It's automatically copied to the Clipboard. Please paste it into a reply.
The Terminal window doesn't show the output. Please don't copy anything from there.

RE: freezing and resetting problems when syncing a large music library

Hi there,
I got a new ipod classic 160gb for christmas. I updated the firmware to 1.0.3 and synced it for the first time. When I tried to play any music it locked up and went into a loop of resetting itself which I could only break by forcing the ipod into disk mode.
I restored the ipod and tried again syncing the music in chunks. This worked until the ipod was about 50% full then it started to freeze and reset again. I took this ipod back to the store but the new one had the exact same problem!
Through a lot of trial and error I have managed to get the ipod working with only part of my library synced. By syncing music a few albums at a time I have managed to get about 86gb (of 120gb) onto it, but surely this is not how it is supposed to be! I have a dual boot system and have the same problems using windows XP or vista.
I know that I'm not the only person experiencing resetting problems with the ipod classic. Are the users who are experiencing these endless resetting problems with the ipod classic those who have large music libraries (i.e over 80gb)? Can the ipod classic simply not handle the large volumes of music it was designed to hold?
The only features I was looking forward to in the new ipod were a) larger capacity hard drive and b) the ability to organise playlists into folders on the ipod for easier browsing. As it stands I cannot sync my full library and navigating through my playlists is so slow it is hardly worth bothering. I never had a minutes trouble with my 5th gen.
Have I been unlucky and the ipod classics I have recieved have been duds? In which case should I arrange another replacement? Or is this typical of the ipod classic user experience when the user has a large music library and many playlists? Should I await a firmware update that might remedy my problems?
Lastly am I doing something wrong? Any help or workarounds would be gratefully appreciated.

best thing to do is use Playlist and Smart Playliss to fill your iPod. Just so you know, since your post seemed to indicate you thought the playlists have to be tailored to what is already on the iPod, when you sync to playlists, any songs needed for those playlists are automatically moved onto the iPod. And any songs NOT in the playlists get removed.
Patrick

Music player capable of a large music library

I've been using arch for about a year now, and really like it! But I still miss one thing, a good Gnome music library/player.
I have a rather large (+-50K songs) which I used to mange and play with foobar on windows. Foobar was perfect, good library, fast, extremely configurable, and very conservative on memory. Especially the memory, what is foobar doing right that all these linux players are doing wrong??
The only thing kind of working for me is mpd+gmpc. This works ok, updates the library fast, but this is a very limited program when it comes to:
- frontend options
- dragging multiple files in playlist
- tag support (genre//musicbrainz id's/sort name)
- etc
I've tried:
- Amarok, which didn't even load my library when I told it to, and uses a bunch of kde libs
- Exaile, takes up 400 mb of memory, starts/responds very slow
- Quod Libet, promising, but also very slow
- Listen, Banshee and others are too buggy and slow
- Foobar on wine, gives a lot of interface errors due to the windows api in wine not being complete
So are there any options I'm currently missing?

fwojciec wrote:
kelnoky wrote:To be honest, there is nothing that can hold a candle to foobar. Nothing. It's the one program that has no equal counterpart on linux. Give up. I was searching for an alternative a very long time after I switched to linux and just didn't find anything. Mpd and Sonata comes close, but yeah...
I used to think the same way... but I got over foobar completely and I don't miss it anymore. The key was to stop looking for a foobar replacement and to rethink how I manage my music library so that it matches the linux way of doing things instead (one app per function). I prefer my current solution -- the main advantage is that I'm completely independent from any particular piece of software -- I could migrate my library to another player in a matter of minutes, for example, which is great.
Same with me. I use mpd with ncmpc along with some small scripts to automate things and other tools if I want to do something besides simply play music- Foobar2k is great and I used it years ago on Windows, but I now prefer having different tools for different jobs. Foobar2k is a rarity in software due to the fact it does everything and does most things a lot better than other function-specific tools. I do not foresee anyone cloning foobar2k in any OS and being successful. 9 times out of 10 such software is a bloated piece of crap, foobar2k just got lucky I agree, you have to rethink how you deal with your music collection if you aren't using foobar2k. I currently have 66,000 songs in mpd and I would never go back to a "regular" client for playing music, not even if foobar2k ran natively under Linux. I am gay for the server/client model now

Managing Large iBooks Library

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