If you're running room out of your hard drive and would rather not bother with the task of upgrading it, you can try relocating your iTunes and iPhoto libraries to an external drive. iPhoto’s pretty open to the idea of moving home. Simply close it and copy your iPhoto library (located in your Pictures folder) to an external volume. Now re-open iPhoto while holding down the Option key and select the library you just moved from its new location. Check all is working okay, then you’re free to delete the original iPhoto library in your Pictures folder.
The process for iTunes is a little fiddly, so we’re providing step-by-step instructions:
Kick things off by opening iTunes Preferences and click on the Advanced tab. Now check the box next to “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library” and click OK.
From the File menu in iTunes, select Library and choose Organize Library. In the window that appears, check both boxes (or whichever is available) to consolidate your iTunes library.
Quit iTunes and locate your iTunes Library folder, which should be in your Music folder unless you’ve moved it. Select it and hit Command-I to see how large it is in comparison to your external drive. Connect the external drive you intend to use and ensure that there’s enough free space available on it to store your iTunes library with room to spare. Drag your iTunes folder from the Music folder to your external drive and wait for it to copy.
Open iTunes again and check that it knows where your new library is. If it doesn’t, open up iTunes Preferences and head to the Advanced tab to tell it where. When all is working correctly, delete your iTunes library from your internal hard drive.
travajito
November 24, 2011 at 6:59am
what does "You can't copy iTunes because it has the same name as another item on the destination volume, and that volume doesn't distinguish between upper and lowercase letters in filenames" suppose to mean? I am trying to move itunes from one external hardrive to another newer bigger one. obviously i did it before long ago but i can't get it to work now because of the extremely annoying message.
MacPrincess
November 06, 2011 at 5:04am
And what about Time Machine?
Will Time Machine make a BKUP of the transfered media?
What if the external drive dies?¿? :-/
This is my only concern... can someone tell me about it?
howardbenz
November 01, 2011 at 3:10pm
I just tried the itunes portion of this. I moved my whole iTunes folder to my WD Network drive. My MacBook Pro and my wies Air both found the new location easy enough. However, when I purchased a new song on iTunes via my MBP, the song will not show up when my wife opens her iTunes. Can someone point me in the right direction on how to resolve this? Thanks.
vterm
October 24, 2011 at 12:54pm
As far as iTunes...
I can speak only for SL 10.6 and not for Lion, but when i tried this a while back, it partially worked...
The problem was that everything was transferred on the external drive of choice, but not the Mobile Applications folder....
I was puzzled by this, as it kept everything else on the external drive but Mobile Apps retained their original position...
And it didn't make any sense to have everything else on an external drive and keep the apps on the system drive, because i have a lot of apps eating a lot of hd space....
I was forced to use a third party app, that allowed me to have various iTunes Libraries located on external disks
and changing the Library that iTunes will load from that app...Can someone verify that the Mobile Applications move to the external drive with lion?
Thanks.
nirl
October 25, 2011 at 1:06am
you can use soft links for that:
i.e. "ln -s /Volume/your-hard-drive/BU Backup" through the terminal
rickpdx
October 24, 2011 at 12:44pm
But isn't it true that moving the iPhoto library to an external drive only works if said external drive is formatted HFS+? If not, then it's going to cause all kinds of problems. I would love to move mine to my NAS drive, but because I share it with Windows users, I can't have it formatted in HFS+, since they wouldn't be able for read files on it.
