My MacBook hard drive is practically full so I purchased an Iomega 200 gb External hard drive (EHD). Can I move my Iphoto Library to the EHD? Is that the best way to free up space on my MacBook? Will Iphoto know where the photos are? Any advice is appreciated.
2. Copy the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
I followed the instructions here and moved the photos to an external drive (Western Digital) that is connected to a time capsule by the USB port. When I opened iPhoto, I navigated to the new location on the external drive. However iphoto says "no photos"
Any suggestions
What's keeping me from dragging all my iPhoto images into an external drive is an error message telling me that the images can't be put in one place because one of the pix is "busy." So none of the pix is moved. The so-called "busy" pic is just one of the crowd to me, and I don't know how to stop it from being busy or even what the nature of its busyness is.
If you're copying the iPhoto Library Folder from your Pictures Folder to the External, and copying it as a single entity (not the constituent parts) then you cannot get this message.
IF, however, you're dragging pics from the Library heading in the iPhoto Window then it's quite possible to get this message.
So, are you trying to move the Library or the images in iPhoto?
Terence, you've answered your own question in noting that I had to have been moving individual pix as a group to receive the error message. And so I was. I could have tried moving the library folder, but it takes up a gig and a half, whereas the individual pix require only a gig. There are more than a thousand pix, so it will take some time for the transfer to happen. And I ran out of time to play with the project, but I'm hoping that by selecting all the pix and then deselecting the one busy one I'll be able to leave it behind and drag all the rest.
So as long as you know that doing what you are doing is
not backing up your Library, only your photos.
This message arises when you try to copy two files of the same name into the same target folder. Your camera is quite capable of producing many files called 12345.jpg and this is the cause of the issue.
To overcome this simply use the Photos -> Batch Change command. Set the
Title to some text and check the box to append a number. This will give each shot a unique title.
Then File -> Export and in the resulting dialogue set it to use the titles as filenames. Then export.
Terence, in fact their are two photos of about the same name, since one is an enhanced copy of the original. Both have the same name, but one has .jpg appended. while the other has no extension at all. I'll try the batch change, but I assume I could just change the name of one of the two and get the same result.
One failing in almost all software documentation I've encountered is that error messages aren't explained. Apparently software designers try to make each message cover a variety of conditions, so the messages end up saying nothing specific about anything.
Terence, I used the batch change feature to add sequential numbers to my pix titles. I didn't add any text, though, so the thumbnails now appear in iPhoto titled only as -1 through about -1210. But they still won't move to my external drive en masse. The sequential numbers are ignored, and the original titles appear in the external drive's window, one at a time -- until a "busy" pic comes along, at which point all the titles are deleted from the external drive, same as before.
This all takes place during a phase identified as "preparing to copy." During this phase, only the titles appear in the external drive's window, with each pic listed as having zero bytes.
Puzzling to me that all these images coexist okay in iPhoto, but can't manage it as individual files in another location.
*Then File -> Export and in the resulting dialogue set it to use the titles as filenames. Then export.*
So don't drag the images to the destination. Export them there. Takes exactly the same time.
Puzzling to me that all these images coexist okay in iPhoto, but can't manage it as individual files in another location.
You can have any number if identically named files on your Mac, you just can't have them in the +same folder+. So, they're in different folders inside the Library.
Terence, the pix exported to the external drive just fine. Thanks for your advice. Now I'm hoping to muster the courage to delete them from my computer's hard drive.
Terence, one object of my moving photos to an external drive is to permit returning iPhoto to its condition when I bought the computer -- that is, empty of photos. How is that accomplished if not by deleting the pix in the iPhoto library?
