Photos stored on my Mac's hard drive?

Where are my photos stored on my Mac's hard drive?

Note to users
Seriously it is ridiculous to use improper and unsupported ways to access your files - iPhoto is a SQLite database and direct access to the database contents is not supported - you should use the proper tools as described above - doing otherwise does not work well and endangers your photos as small errors on a user's part can damage the database and corrupt it causing dataloss
What you need a forum for it to explain to you haw to use the program since you do not bother to read the help information or take the tutorials
LN
PS also note that posting erronous suggestions on two year old threads is not really a smart idea either

Similar Messages

Moving photos off of my mac's hard drive & onto an external without affecting my imported LR2 pics

HI! A little info first...
I am a photog so I have thousands of photos that i work with from my Mac's Internal Hard Drive.
First, I upload photos from my camera to the Pictures folder on my Mac.
Then, I upload the photos LR where I choose the ones I want to keep and edit. I, then, export my edited photos back to the original folder they were in.
I backup daily using Time Machine, so I am good there, but my HD is about completely full so I need to MOVE the folders of Pics OFF of my computer's HD.
I know that if I move the photos off of my HD and onto an external, all of my photos will in LR will be lost (broken links?).
So, I have two questions...
How can I do this big move and still keep my LR folders in tact? Is this possible?
and,
Should I start a new catalog to begin my new batch of incoming photos? I have so many folders in LR now, that I sometimes have a hard time finding the folder that I need.
**I am using LR2
Thank you so much, in advance, for any help or suggestion!!!
Heidi

Hi Heidi!
   Okay, let's see...
i ADD photos to catalog without moving. and when i export...i export them back to their original folder.
So basically, you are elminating most of the functions of using LR in the first place. So, let me explain a bit..
LR is designed to do a couple of things for your; manage large collections of images, and edit images without destruction of the original image.
Let's take the last one first: without destruction.   You are pointing LR at an original image (using the Add import).   You then use LR to do all the edits you like to it. Then you Export back into the same directory, _overwriting_ your original. This means that all of the history that LR keeps track of, such as your color edits, etc, gets wiped out.   That neatly negates LR's ability to do non-destructive editing.   Because you can't go back to your original, having overwritten it.
Do you have a reason why you shoot in jpg mode? Or is it just because you haven't understood or tried raw mode? The difference shooting in raw makes is quite dramatic in LR compared to shooting in jpg. (And, it makes it almost impossible to overwrite the original!) But that can come as a later refinement, if you wish. Let's work on your current problem.
on the left side, under folders...i have about 200 folders from the last
year and i have about 60,000 photos total in my catalog. obviously, it
is getting hard for me to find folders when i need them even though i do
label each folder with the year/month/brief desciption (2010 december
xmas)
I think we have a different description of how you create folders. If you have 200 hundred folders, you are not doing what you claim; year/month/... Becuase that would mean you have been taking photos for 200 years!
Here is what I meant by folder structures. I keep all of my images in a sub-folder called MainCatalog. That way, when I do backups, I only have to grab that one folder, and everything below it is backed up.
Top level is major project, it's the one farthest left, below my parent folder:
MainCatalog
   family_farm
   rugby
   wedding
Under those catagories, each one has a year folder.
MainCatalog
   family_farm
            2010
            2011
And each folder under the year has month
MainCatalog
family_farm
           2010
                 2010-01
                 2010-05
And each folder with month under it has the day,
MainCatalog
family_farm
          2010
                2010-05
                         2010-05-03
                         2010-05-06
You could, for example, replace the bottom folder with a description appended to it. You can see that this decreases the number of folders you have to scan to find what you are looking for; by knowing the year and month, it's down to at most 31 folders. This can be changed around; you could remove the top level project, and just use the rest of it, or move the project to the bottom... many ways of doing it. One reason I chose this method is that LR will create all of the folders for me, I just create the top level major project folder. Then in the import dialog, I point to the major project folder, and tell LR to import via the date format, and choose the year->year-mon->year-mon-day format. Easy.
Now, as to moving your images to an external disk...
First, I would promote a parent folder. This is done from within LR. Bring up LR, and right-click on any of the folders you currently have, and select "promote parent folder". This will have the effect of moving all of your folders into a sub-folder, and you'll now see the sub-folder at the very top in your list. This is good.
And by finder, we meant the normal operating system's finder, not from within LR. Some people move from within LR, some don't. I find that if I use the operating system to move my files and later tell LR to reconnect them, I don't have problems with LR not being able to see the drive, as some people say they do. Works both ways, but I obviously like my way better.
Now, as to moving your images... yep, it's easy, as someone else pointed out. Just drag (move, not copy) and drop onto your new hard drive from your operating system. Then when you bring up LR, you'll see '?' on the folder pane, saying LR doesn't know where these are anymore. Right-click on the top-level (parent) folder that you promoted, and browse to the new location and LR will connect them again. The reason for doing the promote parent is that you only have to do this once; LR will connect all of the folders below it if they are in the same structure.
You don't need to upgrade to LR 3.3 if you don't need to yet; I would recommend downloading Lr 2.7, however, as it fixed a few bugs in 2.6. And it's a free upgrade. With your current worfflow, there isn't a dramatic improvement in using 3.3. The improvements are mostly for raw files, and many people have found that 3.3 is slower in regards to 2.6/2.7.
Does that make sense now?
Cheers!

My Mac's hard drive is full. Mostly of pics and movies. Can I upload and move photos to Icloud, then delete them from my Mac? If yes how?

My Mac's hard drive is full. Mostly of pics and movies. Can I upload and move photos to Icloud, then delete them from my Mac? If yes how?

Use something such as OmniDiskSweeper (my favorite) or Grand Perspective to find out where large files may be. iCloud isn't going to help much if you've so much data that it won't fit on a 1TB drive. Sounds as if it's time to either buy another drive or at least an external with more space.
Good luck,
Clinton
MacBook Pro (15” Late 2011), OS X Yosemite 10.10, 16GB Crucial RAM, 960GB M500 Crucial SSD, 27” Apple Thunderbolt Display

Missing photo links - changing name of external Hard Drive location

I have searched for the answer to this high and low without success if someone can help...
I have a large collection of photos that I store on an external firewire hard drive (too many to store on my macbook pro). My iphoto library is on my Mac and when importing photos to iphoto I did not import the files so the originals remain on the external hard drive and are therefore linked to in iphoto.
I did it this way, rather than storing the library database on the external drive, so that I could access the information and thumbnails when travelling and not connected to my external drive.
I've upgraded my external hard drive and it will have a different name. I need to transfer all the photos across to the new hard drive.
Is there a quick way to reconnect all my original photos when transferred to the new hard drive or a better way to transfer them? Having tried to copy them across manually, obviously as expected I get a missing photo exclamation mark and am asked to browse to the file to relink. This is OK to reconnect one or two photos, but would take me forever with 17,000.
I remember Adobe Photo Album had a command reconnect missing files, and it would go off and search for the files you may have moved location (or changed the directory name in which they were held). Is such a function available in iphoto? I've tried the iphoto re-build functions, but this doesn't look in other attached volumes for the photos.
Alternatively, is there a way to edit the iphoto library database to do a search and replace of the Volume name to the new name and reconnect the link to then photos? e.g. Can you manually edit the albumdata.xml file (and would this be the file to edit) for example, and rebuild the database with Photo Library Manager?
Can you re-import all the photos from the new location, and rebuild the links that way, or does this create duplicate entries and not merge album, keyword event data etc for each photo?
My last resort is re-importing all the photos again, but of course I'd loose all my keywords, albums, events and other info I've spent a long time entering into iphoto.
Thanks
Phil

I just wanted to close this off to say that my solution worked fine and my iphoto libraries are up and running in perfect order again. And to summarise the solution so you don't have to read the entire post above.
This solution is for those wanting to have the iphoto library on your Mac and store the original photos linked elsewhere on an external / network drive (i.e. not imported into the iphoto library). Then you want to change the location where the originals are stored (say for example you get a new bigger external Hard Drive - like I did), and that new location will have a different name. Most people recommend importing the photos into the iphoto library, keeping everything together, and this can then be moved anywhere and accessed.
So to summarise, if you are moving original photos linked into iphoto:
1. Back up everything you can first...
2. First try moving the files (not copying and deleting) - the aliases may reconnect, especially if they are on your main HD. You may need to manually reconnect one file in each sub-directory.
3. Move your photos to your external HD / network drive. Note if the new place has the same name as your old external HD then the aliases probably won't need to be fixed.
4. Download and install File Buddy or similar Alias 'fixer'
5. Go to your iphoto Library, right click, "Show Package Contents"
6. Copy the "Originals" directory to another location so that file buddy can read it.
7. Run File buddy, fixing the aliases in your copy of the Originals folder, pointing to where you've moved your photos too (restrict the directories as much as possible where you point file buddy to search for the missing files to speed it up). You will only have issues if you have multiple copies of the same file - i.e. that have the same file name and creation date, and file buddy will give you a list of these. This in itself is a good check to see you don't have the same file in two places - I only had issues with folders of photos that I'd been given from family in which there were multiple copies of the same photo. I've now cleaned these up, saved space and ran file buddy again to finish the job off.
8. Finally, move this now fixed "Originals" folder back into your iphoto library (package contents) - writing over / replacing the original "Originals" directory.
All being well, should be fixed!
Just to share with you the benefits I find of having my photos stored on an external HD and the iphoto library on my Macbook:
-- Saves space on my limited internal HD
-- others can access the photos, set up and manage their own iphoto libraries pointing at the same originals, and we don't need two copies of the original files
-- I can access the iphoto library and manage albums, add keywords, titles, etc when not connected to the External HD, though you're limited to viewing the (not too small) thumbnail pictures iphoto stores in its library
I'm loving iphoto even more now, it makes managing and viewing my 1000's of photos a pleasure.
Cheers
Phil

I can't move photos from iPhoto to my secondary hard drive or to a burn folder. I have never had a problem with this before. This is something new.   They will not drop into either folder. Nothing happens.

I can't move photos from iPhoto to my secondary hard drive or to a burn folder. I have never had a problem with this before. This is something new.   They will not drop into either folder. Nothing happens.
I checked my secondary harddrive and there is plenty of memory.
I emptied my burn folder but the photos still will not drop into it.
I created a new burn folder, no luck with this either.
230 photos is the maximum size of the events I am trying to move from iPhoto to save elsewhere.
I have shut down and restarted my computer.   No change. The photos still will not drop out of iPhoto.
My Mac Computer Storage shows that I have 62.2GB free out of 249.2GB (movies, photos and contacts taking up the most space)
My Lacie External Harddrive (2TB capacity) shows that I have 1.79TB available. It shows that 207,729,520,640 bytes (207.73 GB on disk) are used.
I have never had this problem before. It is usually very easy to move my photos from iPhoto.
I am not a computer expert (I work in surgery so don't have a need for lots of computer knowledge) so please explain in simple terms.
Thank you so much for any help you can provide.
I really appreciate it.

YES Terence! Thank you. Exporting allowed me to move my photos from iPhoto into the Burn Folder on my desktop.   But that doesn't explain why I'm having to go that route now.   Have I done something (accidentally changed some setting) on my computer that will not allow me to just click and drag anymore?   I really liked the convenience of the click and drag option.
I don't have the time tonight to export and burn a lot of CD/DVDs. I'll try that tomorrow and make sure my photos are moving properly. I also need to export photos to my external hard drive to make sure that route is working.
Wouldn't you know that my Apple Care Plan runs out this Wednesday?! I need to make sure everything is working properly before that expires.
Thank you so much for your help.   I really, really appreciate it.

My Passport for Mac external Hard drive is not recognized

I recently had to purchase a new MacBook Pro, and when I tried to get files off of my Passport for Mac external hard drive. I get an error stating "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." And when I try to initalize, and verify disk, I get this message "Partition map check failed because no slices were found.". I have already updated firmware for the external hard drive. One site I found stated that it could be that the USB port is not strong enough, and I would need a 2.0 Booster cable. Does anyone know if this would work?

What did you old Macbook die from? Likely the HD in it is still ok, yes?
You can remove the HD inside your old dead Mac and put it into a $20 HD enclosure or HD dock, and remove the photos that way, very easy.........IF your old Macbook died from something other than ALSO a bad HD.
You said----my OLD Macbook pro which recently lost video
What happened with your old "dead" macbook? Still have it?

Can I view photos and movies from my external hard drive? I used Time Machine and a WD Passport for backup. Since my drive on my MacBook Pro is filling up I was planning to delete some of the movies and photos.

Can I view photos and movies from my external hard drive? I used Time Machine and a WD Passport for backup. Since my drive on my MacBook Pro is filling up I was planning to delete some of the movies and photos. I wanted to see if I could view them from the hard drive. Thanks

Hello, eco1.
Thank you for visiting Apple Support Communities.
This sounds like you are wanting to move your iTunes media folder to an external drive and have iTunes this folder from this location. If this is the case then I would recommend taking a look at the article below.
iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449
Cheers,
Jason H.

How do I keep photos and videos on an external hard drive and run the application on the macbook

I am running out of space on my Macbook and would like to move all my photos and videos to an external hard drive to free up disk space. How do I designate those drives as the destination drive when running the application (iPhoto, iMovie) on the Macbook.

Moving your iTunes Music folder   http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449
Moving your iPhoto library    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1229
Moving iMovie footage to another drive    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1026

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?

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

My mac mini hard drive is failing. I am no longer under warranty. Do you know how much it cost to have Apple replace the hard drive? or How I can replace it myself?

MY mac mini hard drive is failing. I am no longer under warranty. Do you know how much it cost to have Apple replace the hard drive? or How I can replace it myself?

You can do it yourself. I did on my 2009 Mini
http://www.ifixit.com/Device/Mac_Mini
Also, this place sells HSDs and has install videos.
http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/

Moving Garageband Music Files to MyBook for Mac External Hard Drive on OSX 10.5.8 I'm a musician and need to make space on my mac hd. Is it safe to move music files there and delete them on the mac? Thanks!

use a MyBook for Mac external hard drive.
I need space on garageband or the entire hard drive, since I am getting the "need space on the hard drive" messages.
It's scary to move my precious music files!
How should I move them to the external and feel safe about doing so?
Or are there other methods besides the obvious, clearing caches, deleting the trash and downloads, etc., that are recommended?
I am doing music now and producers are waiting for the new vocals!
Help!
Thanks!

The process is as simple as just copying your Garageband project to the external drive and deleting from the macs hard drive. But before you delete anything you really need to back them up to someplace else also. Having just one copy is not safe. Get another external drive, DVDs or even flash drives, you absolutely need anything important in more then one place.

Uploading my photos into iPhoto from an external hard drive

I have all my old digital photos (approx 17GB) on an external hard drive. I would like to upload them in to iPhoto on my iMac (OS X 10.6.8)
Some questions:
How can I stop any duplicate photos being uploaded into iPhoto (I already have small number of the old photos in iPhoto)
How do I upload the photos into 'Events'? What is the difference between Events and Albums?
Do I need to rename the albums on the hard drive before I upload them with new album names?
How can I delete duplicate photos I already have in iPhoto?
and lastly the iMac is set up with 4 users accounts on it - how do I share (in iPhoto) all these newly uploaded photos with the other users
So many questions, but If I do it right now it will save me hrs of work sorting all the photos out and renaming them all when they are in iPhoto

and lastly the iMac is set up with 4 users accounts on it - how do I share (in iPhoto) all these newly uploaded photos with the other users
For iPhoto 09 (version 8.0.2) and later:
What you mean by 'share'.
If you want the other user to be able to see the pics, but not add to, change or alter your library, then enable Sharing in your iPhoto (Preferences -> Sharing), leave iPhoto running and use Fast User Switching to open the other account. In that account, enable 'Look For Shared Libraries'. Your Library will appear in the other source pane.
Any user can drag a pic from the Shared Library to their own in the iPhoto Window.
Remember iPhoto must be running in both accounts for this to work.
If you want the other user to have the same access to the library as you: to be able to add, edit, organise, keyword etc.
Quit iPhoto in both accounts. Move the Library to the Users / Shared Folder
(You can also use an external HD set to ignore permissions, a Disk Image or even partition your Hard Disk.)
In each account in turn: Double click on the Library to open it. (You may be asked to repair the Library Permissions.) From that point on, this will be the default library location. Both accounts will have full access to the library, in fact, both accounts will 'own' it.
However, there is a catch with this system and it is a significant one. iPhoto is not a multi-user app., it does not have the code to negotiate two users simultaneously writing to the database, and trying will cause db corruption. So only one user at a time, and back up, back up back up.

Using non-mac external hard drive with time machine

Is it possible to use a non-mac external hard drive (ie, anything other than Time Capsule) connected to Airport Extreme with Time Machine?
If so, how do I make the external hard drive visible in the back up disk list?

see this [link|http://www.macworld.com/article/132613/2008/03/airporttime.html].

I just bought a MBA and I need to move my photos and itunes to an external hard drive (from my old MacBook Pro) because they won't fit on the Air. I got the photos moved fine and I followed an online tutorial to move the necessary files for itunes, but i

I just bought a MBA and I need to move my photos and itunes to an external hard drive (from my old MacBook Pro) because they won't fit on the Air. I got the photos moved fine and I followed an online tutorial to move the necessary files for itunes, but it didn't work. The files copied fine, but when I tell iTunes on the Air to look at the external drive for the library, it doesn't find anything. What I copied was the entire iTunes Media folder. So, how do I move the necessary iTunes files from my old Pro to a external drive so I can access them from my new Air? Whew!

iTunes- How to move the library to an EHD
After you move the library you need to open iTunes by first depressing the OPTION key then launching iTunes. You will be given a choice of which library to use. This can then be made a permanent change, if you wish, in the Advanced section of iTunes preferences.

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?

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

Photos stored on my Mac's hard drive?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for