How do I change the default path of my Pictures folder?

[elundeen]

I running out of room on my internal hard drive, so I just bought an external one and am in the process of moving my entire music, photo and movie libraries to it.

I am wondering, is there a way to change the default path for pictures to automatically use my picture file on the external hard drive rather than the internal? If I try downloading a pic off the web or from an email attachment, it always wants put it back on the internal hard drive.

I figure there has to be an easy way to do it, right?

I have an older Macbook running OSX Leopard, in case it matters. (I'm really not very good with computers, so I don't know what matters and what doesn't)

Also, is it possible to move my applications folder to my new external hard drive and run all of my apps off that as well?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!

 

[dgbowers]

I am wondering, is there a way to change the default path for pictures to automatically use my picture file on the external hard drive rather than the internal? If I try downloading a pic off the web or from an email attachment, it always wants put it back on the internal hard drive.

I'm assuming you mean your iPhoto Library, and if that's the case, you should be able to navigate to your pictures folder, and then drag the iPhoto Library to the external drive. Next time you open iPhoto it should ask you where your library went, and you just tell it to look in the external.

Also, is it possible to move my applications folder to my new external hard drive and run all of my apps off that as well?

I would definitely NOT recommend doing this, if you're running apps from a USB drive the performance of the applications is going to suffer greatly. USB 2.0 has a transfer speed of 480 MB/s while your internal SATA drive has a minimum transfer speed of 1.5 GB/s (sometimes 3.0 GB/s depending on which Mac you have).

 

[eleven7]

If I try downloading a pic off the web or from an email attachment, it always wants put it back on the internal hard drive.

I figure there has to be an easy way to do it, right?

Once you've moved your iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes libraries to your external drive, I'm sure you will find you should have more than enough space for your downloaded email attachments and pics from the web. However, if you still want all your downloads to go onto your external drive, you could just change the default "downloads" folder location in your browser preferences. You could also set that to prompt you to select where you want to save each file before it starts the download, that way you choose which files go to your external drive