im getting frustrated. My MAC is only about 3 years old but I don't have enough memory to back up my phone on it. What are my options? My iPhoto has about 20k pics, maybe if I move that to my external drive it would help? But i can't figure out how to do that. Lol. Can someone help me out. Thanks in advance.
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Smallest hard drive ever
- Thread starter nojokews6
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Don’t get confused with memory and storage. Memory is referring to RAM which allows users to multitask while storage is the amount of files you are allowed to put into it.
First of all, what is the storage size of your Mac? What is the storage size of your phone? You mentioned that you have 20k pics in iPhotos. Are you sure that you need all of them? Since you are asking this, I am guessing some of the photos are blurred and out of focus. Maybe try reviewing the photos and see what can be trashed. In addition, try moving photos or any large files to an external harddisk.
Here's an option that'll let you keep your photos and not spend money on a new drive. Like you wanted to do, here's how to move to an external drive.
First and foremost, make a backup of you hard drive with time machine. That's just something you should be doing already.
Plug in your external drive, open finder, and drag your iPhoto Library into you external drive. Once that is complete, hold OPTION when starting iPhoto. A new window should pop up and you should select OTHER LIBRARY. Find where you moved the files to on your external drive and click CHOOSE. Now close iPhoto, disconnect your external, delete the files from your main drive.
Easy peasy. Downside is if you try to use iPhoto without the external drive attached you'll get an error that your library can't be found. So you'll kinda be bound using that external drive for iPhoto unless you change the library back to your internal drive.
This is what I have been trying to do. I can't figure out how to get the photos out of iPhoto into the external hd. Also have another question. Does iPhoto have something to is the photo by or does it just go by the named file. Meaning if I start taking photos on my new empty iPhone will it start at 0.jpg and rewrite over the 0.jpg from my last phone? I just don't want to lose any photos of the kids. Thanks in advance as you can tell I'm a novice at this.
Firstly 20k is an incredibly small amount of storage space. Do you mean 20gb??
Secondly you give us no idea of how much space your Mac has, 128gb drive,256gb drive?? So how much space do you have on your Mac??
Thirdly how much free space do you have left?? What is using that space ?? Click on the Apple symbol in the task bar and go to about my Mac click on the storage tab and see where your space is being used and report that here there's might be much better ways of creating some space.
You can use finder to get to your photo libraries these can be copied onto an external drive for safe keeping or if you have an external drive with more space than your Mac uses you can use time machine to back up your whole system. (You should always have a complete backup of your system, no matter who you are anyway, external drives are cheap and easy to get hold there is no excuse, any computer can fail catastrophically at any time and you can lose everything).
Lastly your iPhone should not be affected at all unless it is plugged into you Mac and you tell it to delete all the photos from it.
Secondly you give us no idea of how much space your Mac has, 128gb drive,256gb drive?? So how much space do you have on your Mac??
Thirdly how much free space do you have left?? What is using that space ?? Click on the Apple symbol in the task bar and go to about my Mac click on the storage tab and see where your space is being used and report that here there's might be much better ways of creating some space.
You can use finder to get to your photo libraries these can be copied onto an external drive for safe keeping or if you have an external drive with more space than your Mac uses you can use time machine to back up your whole system. (You should always have a complete backup of your system, no matter who you are anyway, external drives are cheap and easy to get hold there is no excuse, any computer can fail catastrophically at any time and you can lose everything).
Lastly your iPhone should not be affected at all unless it is plugged into you Mac and you tell it to delete all the photos from it.
Thanks for you help. I'm getting there. I just checked like you said and my MAC has a 250.14 capacity with 15.9 available. I don't really know what's using all my space either. Could you explain a little better how to use finder to get my photo albums off. Thanks again
- You shouldn't take photos out of iPhoto and move them to the external drive. You should do as described by MacEMT and move your iPhoto library as a whole to the external drive.
Open your Home folder in Finder and navigate to the "Pictures" folder. There you will see a file named approximately "iPhotolibrary.photolibrary". Drag that to your external drive. Open iPhoto while holding down Alt to tell it to look for the library on the external drive. Quit iPhoto. When you're satisfied that it works, delete the original iPhoto file from the Pictures folder.
Do you live anywhere near an Apple Store? If so make reservation with the Genius Bar and someone can help you learn the iPhoto ins and outs.
My Daughter-in-law had a similar problem as yours and after working with her we found she had gigs of photos and video she needed to just throw out. Additionally we needed about an hour plus to walk through the features of the software and learn to do some basics like, not import every photo and video when he iPhone was plugged in.
I might also ask how large is you audio/iTunes library?
Media, especially HD and high quality audio, uses a huge amount of memory and at some point we need to start sorting what should be on the hard drive, on our personal devices, stored externally or trashed.
My Daughter-in-law had a similar problem as yours and after working with her we found she had gigs of photos and video she needed to just throw out. Additionally we needed about an hour plus to walk through the features of the software and learn to do some basics like, not import every photo and video when he iPhone was plugged in.
I might also ask how large is you audio/iTunes library?
Media, especially HD and high quality audio, uses a huge amount of memory and at some point we need to start sorting what should be on the hard drive, on our personal devices, stored externally or trashed.
If your iPhone backup in iTunes is one of your major challenges, you can also consider moving that to an external drive.
Here are some instructions: http://osxdaily.com/2016/03/04/backup-iphone-to-external-hard-drive-mac/
Here are some instructions: http://osxdaily.com/2016/03/04/backup-iphone-to-external-hard-drive-mac/
Give the daisy disk free trial a go it will tell you what's using all your disk space and then you can get rid of duplicates time machine snapshots etc I bet you can free up a fair amount of space, without having to move anything.
https://daisydiskapp.com/
https://daisydiskapp.com/
