Move your iPhoto 09 Library to an External Drive

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Move your iPhoto 09 Library to an External Drive

Posted 05/18/2009 at 5:44:17pm | by Roberto Baldwin

iphoto 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.

iphoto

3. Now rename the iPhoto Library in the original destination "iPhoto Library.Old"

iphoto

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.

COMMENTS: 7

TAGS: iLife 09. iPhoto 09

COMMENTS

Time Machine Can Backup Your External Drives.
Submitted by Rebelord on Mon, 2009-05-18 23:07

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

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How about older iPhoto versions?
Submitted by Myschief247 on Tue, 2009-05-19 20:24

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.

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Older iPhoto Version
Submitted by Roberto Baldwin on Wed, 2009-05-20 07:43

Hi,
I'll try to get a how-to posted for older versions of iPhoto this week.
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Older iphoto iLife'06: move library/create new
Submitted by wendygym on Fri, 2009-05-22 08:12

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).

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consolidate
Submitted by cazzie98 on Tue, 2009-07-28 08:38

I like this idea and it seems easy, is there a way to consolidate 2 iphoto libraries?

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iPhoto 08
Submitted by PaulBern on Thu, 2009-08-13 13:53

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?

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Submitted by benet (not verified) on Tue, 2009-11-10 19:03

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