Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

"spiff"

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 3, 2007
5
0
How do i move all my photos from the location that iPhoto has set to an external HD? Anyone got a easy way how to do it?
 
Just drag the iPhoto Library folder to where you want it on the external drive. When time you start iPhoto, hold the Option-key to bring up a dialog box. The click "Choose Library" and select the iPhoto Library folder in it's new location. That should be it:)
 
Ok, thanks. Now i can delete the old folder, or? If i dont have the portable HD with me, the pictures is stored at the old location or? Because im not taking the portable HD with me when im travling. And does the iPhoto duplicate the pictures?
 
i'm having the same question...

i want to move all my photos (they're in iphoto) to my new external drive. but i DON'T want iphoto to change the iphoto library folder, i want it in my imac internal drive. I just want to make a Back up of the pic in the new external drive.

how to do it???
 
[QUOTE="spiff";3865474]Ok, thanks. Now i can delete the old folder, or? If i dont have the portable HD with me, the pictures is stored at the old location or? Because im not taking the portable HD with me when im travling. And does the iPhoto duplicate the pictures?[/QUOTE]

You now have two identical libraries, if you delete the one on your mac then those photos will be only available on the portable HD library. You could have a separate library for on the go but merging them will be a pain.
 
You could do this.

Close down iPhoto. Move your iPhoto Library folder to the external drive (pressing cmd - ie. the apple key - while dragging the folder to the external drive will move rather than copy).

Then on the folder on the external drive, right click (or ctrl-click), select "Make alias". This will create a file called "iPhoto Library.alias". Cmd-drag this back to Pictures, rename it by removing the .alias part of the name, relaunch iPhoto as normal. To iPhoto, it'll be as if nothing changed but it'll be reading from the external drive.

You would have issues trying to use iPhoto (it wouldn't have a valid library) if you don't have the external drive, but I believe it will create a new library called "iPhoto Library 1" in Pictures. When you travel without your external HDD, you could save the photos then load them into the main iPhoto library when you're back at home.
 
I have taken a copy of the libary from iPictures and moved to the external drive. So now i can delete all the information on the internal hd and make an alias file andput there?
 
I shoot a lot of Photos and my workflow back on windows was "Shoot, transfer to hard disk, keep for a while" whenever my hard disk got full I would transfer the older photos to an external hard disk where I keep the most of my photos because I have almost 500Gb of photos.

I really like iPhoto and I really would like to do this workflow on iPhoto, having places and faces seted up.
I want to have the possibilite to move a folder to an external hard disk and read the photos from there whenever they are available.

Any help?
 
Just drag the iPhoto Library folder to where you want it on the external drive. When time you start iPhoto, hold the Option-key to bring up a dialog box. The click "Choose Library" and select the iPhoto Library folder in it's new location. That should be it:)

I did this but when it came to choose library I gave it a new folder thinking it would all pop in there. This new folder is unable to open the images (which also cannot be read on my internal drive). WHAT CAN I DO? The images must still be readable somewhere (I hope)?

Any advice for a beginner?
 
Moving Movies to external Hard Drive

Hi guys, just read the thread on moving photos the external hard drive. Does this same process work for movies as well?

I am having some problems transfering movies to an external hard drive. Any sugestions? Cheers Dusty.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.