moving itunes and iPhoto to external

This is our resident iPhoto guru, Terence Devlin's, advice:

You can move your iPhoto Library to an external disk:

1. Quit iPhoto

2. Copy the iPhoto Library Folder as an entity 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.

Similarly for iTunes:

1. Quit iTunes

2. Drag the iTunes folder from your internal hd - located in ~/Music folder - to your external hd. DO NOT delete the original one from your internal hd... yet!

3. When the transfer is complete, press and hold the Option(alt) key and fire up iTunes.

4. A "Choose iTunes Library" window will come up. Click on the "Choose Library" button.

5. Navigate to where the iTunes folder is located in the external hd.

6. Within the iTunes folder, select the iTunes Library file and click Choose...

That's it. iTunes will now display all your playlists, songs, movies, podcasts etc. At this point, should you wish, you can delete the iTunes folder from the internal hd to free up space.

More info:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751

Or if you prefer a more complicated explanation:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to -a-new-hard-drive

At your home directory (your home directory is named your user name) you will see folders like pictures, music, downloads, documents, .....

Inside the folder music is a folder called itunes. Quit the program itunes if it is running and copy the folder itunes to the external drive. Once the copy is complete, you hold the "alt or option" key and start itunes the program. It will ask you where the library is, select the itunes library on the external drive. If everything loads up fine and you are happy, then you can delete the folder itunes from the internal drive.

The same basic procedure is used for iphoto. Look in the pictures folder, find the iphoto library folder, copy it to the external, ......

To see the space these are taking up, right click on the folder and select "get info" it can take a few seconds but you will see how big the folders are.

Your internal drive is almost out of space (2.7GB left from 159GB).

Maybe to keep this simple, go to your home directory. It has the picture of the "house" in finder and is labeled your user name. Go inside your home folder and you should see other folders (pictures, music, movies, documents, downloads, ..)

Right click each folder and select get info or highlight it and hit command-i. This will bring up a window and in that window you will see how much space of the 159GB that particular folder uses.

Let's start with this.

Thank you to everyone for answering this question about moving iPhoto and iTunes to an external drive.

I have a follow up question..

Will my time machine still make a copy of my iTunes and iPhoto if they live on another drive?