Using Time Capsule to free up space

[LoveMyChocLabs]

Hey all.
My MacBook is out of space. I have purchased a Time Capsule (1TB) to back up, and I thought, to free up space on my computer.

What I would like to do is move my pictures/videos over to the TC in order to remove them from my Mac harddrive so I have more room. Is this possible?

Things I've tried:

I copied one picture from iPhoto (mac hd) to the TC, then deleted it from the iPhoto library (and emptied the trash). I went to the TC, and opened the picture, but it opened using "Preview".
That wasn't what I wanted, so I experimented with iPhoto this afternoon and it doesn't appear to work the way I thought it would, either. I copied my entire iPhoto app to the TC, confirmed all pictures were there, removed 1 picture from my computer HD and when I reopened the TC version, that picture was removed there as well.

Ultimately, I would like to move all my pictures and movies off my computer and start fresh with new ones. Is this something that I can do with Time Capsule?

 

[movieboy23]

Any chance you might be able to get a tech-savvy friend help you with this on? You seem to misunderstand how iPhoto works and the purpose of a normal external hard drive vs. a Time Capsule.

For starters: iPhoto doesn't store your photos in the Applications folder. That's just the link to the program itself. Your photos are packaged together as an iPhoto library which can likely be found in your Pictures folder located within the main Home folder. You would have to move that to an external drive to save some room on your MacBook. But even then you'll have to guide the iPhoto application to the new library by holding down the 'Option' key while starting iPhoto and locating the new directory for the file. Not to mention you won't be able to open your photo library if you're not at home.

And the Time Capsule is sold on the premise that it is a wireless router combined with an external hard drive, so that you can use Apple's pre-installed Time Machine utility to wirelessly backup the contents of your hard drive onto your home network. But Time Machine is meant for recovering deleted files and restoring backups of your hard drive should something happen to your computer. The application is not built for people who casually want to move things off of their computer to save room.

I would probably spring for a new internal hard drive and have a data transfer done to move your old files to the new drive. It's a much better solution for someone who's not that tech-savvy.