I need to purchase an external hard drive for my Mac. I have learned that I do not need to purchase a mac formatted drive. If I purchase a non formatted drive, and then format it for my mac, will I be limited to a 4GB file size? I am planning to move my iphoto library to my external drive but it is 60GB. Will I be able to do this? So confused....also novice user here.....
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External Storage/Iphoto
- Thread starter Iowastate21
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You can buy any external drive and format it with Disk Utility. OS X will ask you once you plug it in. It will be like any other Mac drive.
You can purchase any drive. Once you plug into your Mac, you open up Disk Utility and format it to whichever format you like.
If this external drive won't be used with a Windows computer, then you can format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
If you want to use it on both systems, you format it as FAT 32 (which has a limit of 4GB per file) or exFAT (no file size limitations, but may not work well with Windows 7 and below).
Your iPhoto library is actually a single folder that has many individual files within it. So unless you've got videos in the library, FAT 32 should work as well.
Thank you! I was worried about the "library" being to big and not being able to copy it over once I formatted the external hard drive. So I should be good to go!
Once the iphoto library is moved to the hard drive, when I upload pictures from my camera, (as long as I copied it right), my pics should load up there right???
Once the iphoto library is moved to the hard drive, when I upload pictures from my camera, (as long as I copied it right), my pics should load up there right???
Yes, but for that to happen, you must:
1. Open up iPhoto while holding down the Option key on the keyboard so that when prompted, you can choose the iPhoto library residing on your external drive. You only have to do this once.
2. The external drive must be connected to the computer before you open iPhoto.