Importing from camera to external hard drive with iPhoto 8

[dancingred]

Hello all

I've had great success moving my iPhoto library to my external drive but I am having difficulty importing photos from my camera straight to my external drive. I'm using my MacBook with Mac OS X 10.5.8 and iPhoto 8.

Prior to importing photos from my camera I had 196.4MB available on my internal hard drive and 64 photos to import. While some of the photos were importing my available space dropped to 23.9MB available. 9 photos came in, but then it said: 55 unreadable files. The rest of the photos did not import. After clicking okay and deleting the 9 files from camera after importing, it now shows on my internal hard drive 193.8MB available. And I have 891.09GB free on my external.

Just wondering if this means the photos are imported from the camera to the internal drive first, rather than going straight to the external? If so, is there a way to get around this? It would be so much easier if I could import 100+ photos in one go....

Also does iPhoto save some sort of copy on my internal drive as well?

Trying to make sense of this. Thanks in advance

 

[osx11]

Step 1: While pressing the option key, launch iPhoto
Step 2: Select the location of your library (on external drive)
---> Proceed to import pictures as if you were using your internal library.
Step 3: Import pictures into library (since you told iPhoto that the library is on the external drive, it will automatically import your photos to your external drive's library.)

Note: There will NOT be a copy on the internal drive. By telling iPhoto to open a library located on an external drive, everything you do will affect the external drive only.

 

[dancingred]

Hi osx11, thanks for your prompt reply

I am following your steps, and selected the library in my external again just to make sure, however the same thing is still happening.

I had 2 folders open in the Finder while importing photos from the camera, one with my external drive selected showing 891.09GB available at the bottom of the window, and the other with my home folder selected with 196.4MB available. As the photos were importing from camera my available space in the home folder dropped to 23.9MB available and then would not finish the import. The available space in my external went down slightly as well. At the end of importing (after I selected okay to delete photos from camera after importing) the available space in my home folder 193.8MB available.

The same pattern is still happening now as I import more photos, just obviously the amounts of space available are different now.

Any more thoughts?