Can you transfer iPhoto and iMovie files to External USB?

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Can you transfer iPhoto and iMovie files to External USB?

Our family has had a Mac for about a year and recently we started getting warnings about space and Startup Disk getting full. We have a 250GB drive and and have about 30GB free. Movies are taking up 121GB and Pictures 31GB. We want to move the iMovie files off the laptop after we create a DVD of our sons basketball season. Recently my wife deleted files by going to iPhoto and selected multiple files and then pressed OPTION + COMMAND + DELETE, to remove them. Afterwards iPhoto said it was updating library and was scanning like up to 84K of items. We only had a library of 6K items. Once complete it did finally show about 1k items left. I would really like to copy files to USB rather than delete them. Help, how do you move these files to USB?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Feb 19, 2012 5:11 PM

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Answer 1

eww

Level 9

53,028 points

Feb 19, 2012 8:05 PM in response to Darcwon

I don't use iMovie and can't advise you about that, but to move your iPhoto Library to an external drive just locate it inside the Pictures folder and drag the library's icon to the drive's icon and drop it. The entire library will be copied. After the copying is finished (121 GB will take quite a while), open iPhoto while holding down the Option key and select the library on the external drive. That will now be the default library that iPhoto will open whenever you launch iPhoto and the external drive is connected. Once you're satisfied that it's in good working order, you can delete the original Library from the Pictures folder in your Home folder and empty the Trash. You must never try to move or copy only part of an iPhoto Library; doing so will completely destroy the relationsips of all the images and data within it.

Two very important cautions, though:

1. If you launch iPhoto WITHOUT the external drive connected, it will open whatever library it can find, or will create a new one, on the internal drive. So don't open it when the external drive isn't connected.

And most importantly,

2. Now that the only copy of your iPhoto Library is on the external drive, you MUST BACK IT UP on a DIFFERENT external drive, or sooner or later you will lose it.

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