iPhoto Question??

I don't think you can. Maybe they'll let you do it in a future version.

You could try moving the iPhoto library and making an alias to the library folder in the place iPhoto is looking for the library folder.

I'm not sure what you mean... do you mean that you've moved the iPhoto application to another drive, but your imported photos still end up in ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library and you want to change that?

OK, then that should work. Make a folder called "iPhoto Library" (in fact, call it whatever you want - it will be your new iPhoto Library folder) and put it wherever you want to. Then ctrl+click it and choose "Make Alias." Move the alias to ~/Pictures and rename it "iPhoto Library." Now whenever iPhoto imports new photos, it will still put them in ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library, BUT, that folder is not really a folder - it's an alias that will automatically redirect everything that's placed into it to that other folder you just made. So iPhoto will think that your iPhoto library is in ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library, but it's really not.

You don't need a ~/Pictures on the other partition. ("~" = "/Users/yourhomefolder.") Keep the Pictures folder that's in your home directory where it is now, then make a new folder on the other partition (where you want your pictures to go) and create an alias to that folder which is called 'iPhoto Library' and which exists inside ~/Pictures (or /Users/yourhomefolder/Pictures).

I haven't tried this myself, by the way... if THAT doesn't work, making a symbolic link in the Terminal would almost certainly work (99.999% sure).

The thing is that iPhoto is looking for its library in that one location. You could get around this by "tricking" iPhoto into thinking that this library is where it should be when it in fact resides on another drive. I don't know how big of a deal this is for you, but I had this all typed out anyway so I might as well post it. It's long, but it's very easy (I think).

So the goal is to make an alias, or link, from FolderB to FolderA, so that anything that gets put into FolderA gets automatically redirected to FolderB.

Step 1

First of all, FolderA gets moved to FolderB, so that it becomes FolderB. If you take a look at the two drives you're working with:

- Macintosh HD
- Other Partition

What you want to do is make it so that "Macintosh HD/Users/YourHomeFolder/Pictures/iPhoto Library" becomes "Other Partition/iPhoto Library", so that your iPhoto Library longer exists on the partition you're moving it from.

Step 2

The Terminal is an application in your /Applications/Utilities folder. It gives you a command prompt at which you can type commands. You need the Terminal in order to be able to make symbolic links which are what are required for tricking iPhoto. Symbolic links are aliases between files or folders, so that if you have a folder called "trees" and you want to be able to access that folder from two locations in your folder hierarchy, you can make a symbolic link from "trees" to "trees-alias" or whatever and read/write to & from "trees" by accessing "trees-alias" instead of "trees". I hope that makes sense. If not, bear with me, because you don't need to understand how it works, you just need to do it.

The exact command you will use will vary depending on the names of the folders involved, but let's keep working with the FolderA and FolderB example:

- FolderA is "Macintosh HD/Users/YourHomeFolder/Pictures/iPhoto Library".
- FolderB is "Other Partition/iPhoto Library". (You can rename this to whatever you like, though - substitute "Other Partition" for the actual name of your other partition.)

In the Terminal, the command you would want to use at the prompt to make the proper alias is (type this AFTER you've done step 1):

ln -s /Volumes/DriveB/iPhoto\ Library ~/Pictures

Where DriveB is the name of your other partition (the partition you want to move your iPhoto Library to).

That should do the trick...

What I think...

I don't know why iPhoto doesn't let you move your photos to a different folder, but I guess they are better organized when they are all in one folder, eh, tahts what I think

I love my Mac...