My wife and I have a huge iPhoto library on an external hard drive connected to our iMac. We are going on vacation for a week and I was wondering if we can take the hard drive with us, open the iPhoto library on my MacBook Pro and edit, tag, and organize the photos and have the changes stick once we bring the drive back home.
By default, iPhoto stores your entire photo library in a single iPhoto Library file that is located in ~/Pictures. With this file stored on an external drive, you can work on your library on the go from any Mac.
The iPhoto Library file holds your entire photo collection, including tags and other metadata.
Disconnect your portable drive from your iMac, and plug it in to your MacBook Pro. Hold down the Option key on your keyboard while launching iPhoto. This will open the Library selector; using the “Other Library” button, navigate to and select the iPhoto Library file on your external drive, and then click Open. Your iPhoto library will load from the external drive.
One of the big downsides to carrying around your iPhoto library is that if you lose the drive, then you will lose all of your photos. To avoid this problem, you could alternatively use iCloud’s Photo Stream feature, or a service like Flickr to upload and store your photos. When you get back home, you could offload the pictures from iCloud or Flickr to your main iPhoto library. It’s also not a bad idea to leave a backup copy of your library at home, just in case disaster strikes.
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steverkruse
January 26, 2012 at 7:25am
I've used the process explained above with great success. One problem you'll run into is all computers will need the same version of iPhoto running to access the iPhoto Library.
