If you're like the fine folks here at Mac|Life, you spend way too much time taking pictures of random stuff and archiving it for later use. All these photos are taking a toll on our tiny MacBook Pro drives. If your internal drive is 20 percent photos, you got a problem. If 80 percent of those pics are of cats, you need psychological help.
Well we can't help you and your crazy cat lady/man ways, but we can't help you get your photos off your internal drive and onto another drive or an external drive.
1. Shut down iPhoto.
2. Find your iPhoto library, User>Pictures>iPhoto Library and copy it to the new drive.
3. Now rename the iPhoto Library in the original destination "iPhoto Library.Old"
4. Open iPhoto. You will be presented with a dialog box asking you to choose between "iPhoto Library" and "iPhoto Library.Old." Choose "iPhoto Library," that's the library you've moved to the external drive.
5. iPhoto should load all your photos. Before you get all delete happy, double check your photos. Maybe keep the file around for a few days. Just in case.
We moved our iPhoto Library to an 1TB Internal drive on our Mac Pro and on to a 512GB external we keep in our bag for our MacBook Pro. We also want to remind you that you should backup your iPhoto Library on a regular basis since it'll no longer be part of your Time Machine backup.
Note: In my desire to make sure everyone backs up their data, I completely forgot that Time Machine does indeed back up external drives. Just make sure you're using a drive seperate from your Time Machine drive.
David Vigliotti
March 07, 2013 at 10:05am
When I went to move the iphoto to the external hard drive, I was asked if I wanted to "replace" iphoto. We have a previous library already stored on the hard drive. I know I do not want to replace it. Can you advise how to move the "new" iphoto library to the external hard drive w/out replacing the one previously moved? Thanks.
JohnT
August 08, 2011 at 6:17am
After storing the iPhoto 09 Library onto an External Hard Drive can you still extract photos to an iPad?
ksbarrett
October 21, 2010 at 2:41pm
I don't want to move the last 2 years, but everything prior to that I would like to move to my external drive. I'm only connected to the external drive about once a week for backups. Is there a way to do only some of my library?
How do I "marry" the external drive photos then to iPhoto when I open it on my MacBook and am connected to the external drive?
Prinzivalli
September 17, 2010 at 1:56am
I followed your directions to a T and while I can open iPhoto via ext drive, the pics do not show - they are there but I can only see them when I select "edit" however, I cannot edit, open, copy, nothing...what did I do? How can I recover?
goldfinch
May 09, 2010 at 11:10am
Try iPhoto Library Manager, http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/ It merges libraries, also makes it easier to have separate libraries.
benet
November 10, 2009 at 8:03pm
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PaulBern
August 13, 2009 at 2:53pm
I'm using Mac OS X Tiger with iLife/iPhoto 08. I read the comment about getting the Move your iPhoto for older versions but so far haven't found it. Did I miss something? I tried the procedure here for iPhoto 09 but it did not work. I have a 320 GB drive in my Mac Mini and a 500 GB drive in a V stack box for backup. Somehow my iPhoto files were missing when I opened the program in the mini but they are still intact on the external drive. What could cause the photos to disappear?
cazzie98
July 28, 2009 at 9:38am
I like this idea and it seems easy, is there a way to consolidate 2 iphoto libraries?
wendygym
May 22, 2009 at 9:12am
Yes!!! I am still on am imac G5 running Tiger & iLife '06 and have over 15,000 photos, 2 external drives (250 GB-full/ 750GB with 500GB free. I need to access old photos, but don't need them to be on my original hard drive (160GB).
Myschief247
May 19, 2009 at 9:24pm
Ok, some of us can't upgrade as often as we'd like. Does it work the same way for older iPhoto versions or are there separate tricks? My nine-year-old iMac with the 13 GB hard drive could use some room and I have a 500 GB external drive just begging for my iPhoto library.
Roberto Baldwin
May 20, 2009 at 8:43am
Hi,
I'll try to get a how-to posted for older versions of iPhoto this week.
Rebelord
May 19, 2009 at 12:07am
I noticed you made this comment...
"We also want to remind you that you should backup your iPhoto Library on a regular basis since it'll no longer be part of your Time Machine backup."
But I noticed that Time Machine does backup my external drives that I use with my Macbook Pro. I think Time Machine has preferences to actually include your external drives along with your computer, but you obviously would need a big enough Time Machine hard drive, plus you might need to check your settings.
Sincerely,
Rebelord
