Photos to external drive

Yes and no. What you may have to do is find those old photos in the iPhoto Library and copy them to the external drive.

Actually iPhoto is not good for this type of thing. Because of the way it copies images into it own folder structure making it very hard to find the actual photos. They are buried deep inside the iPhoto Library.photolibrary package in the Masters folder and subsequent sub-sub folder.

Photos are probably your most precious thing to loose. Make backups on the external drive. When you want to access them when you do not have the external disk with you.

I suggest that you replace your internal HDD for a much larger one, then use the original in an external enclosure for backups.

The internal HDD is 2,5" and max 9,5mm thick. There are lots of internal drives available and cheap. Buy with OWC they have a lot of experience and offers.

When you have it, put it in an external enclosure, use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone the existing disk to the new one. Then start from the new one to see if everything is OK, then swith the disks.

After that you can format the old disk and use for backups.

If you have 300GBs of images you need to invest in some other photo management/cataloging/viewing program as iPhoto Ain't Cut Out to handle such large libraries.

As to copying some of you images over to an external drive I don't know how to proceed as I don't use iPhoto I use Lightroom.

I do know this, iPhoto puts all images in its Masters folder buried inside the iPhoto Library.photolibrary folder/Package and to get to them can be time consuming.

I have some experience with iPhoto and LightRoom. I use LR4 already for a few years and am very happy with it.

Sure Adobe Lightroom. For starters unless you set iPhoto to NOT copy all your image files into it own library folder structure, and to leave them where you place them on your drive (if you do that), it buries them deep inside it library folder structure making it very hard to actually get at the images without using iPhoto. Like if you wanted to copy some or all of them to an external for safe keeping.

Where as with Lightroom it can import from a camera or memory card and places them where you want them outside of it's cataloging folder system along with creating folders for dates the images were taken and or placing them all into one folder. It is very flexable in this matter.

Also it doesn't auto create Events (Whatever that is) but will allow you to create either separate catalogs or collections of images from any date, time, event you want and from multiple different folders of images. It is also much better at editing images as even with JPG images it does not change the Base image and can create either duplicates or virtual copy of the image. Even if you don't create a Dups or virtual copy it does not change the base image and just Adds Edits to the image. Then when exporting or printing that image it exports or prints that image with the edits you have made again without damaging and or changing the original image in any way.

In my opinion it is one of the best image cataloging, management and viewing programs around, hands down.

With the newest version of lightroom, V4, I rearely use Photoshop for most of the images I take.

To answer some of your other questions.

you have to look into the folder I pointed to above by right clickinig on it and selecting Show Package Contents. Then you are greeted with soomething like this.

In the Masters folder you should find a bunch of sub-sub folders that will hold all you images. you'll need to go through it and see what you want to copy over to the external or copy them all over to the external by last folder name which is more then likely the date the images where taken.

You may also be able to do it in iPhoto, don't know I really have never used iPhoto for anythiing other then trying to help other Mac users.

Depending on how the external drive is formatted there is only one limit and that is to total FILE size, not Folder size. If the external is formatted FAT32 you can't store FILES larger then 4GB. With FOLDERs there is not limit as long as there aren't any FILES inside a folder larger then 4GBs. But no limit to the number of files in any folder.

With the Mac format there is no limit to file or folder size or number of files in each folder.

And with exFAT, a newer Windows format, there is not limit that you would ever have to worry about.

meg in wa wrote:

My MacBook Pro is only a few months old and the internal disk drive is 500 GB. Trouble is my iPhoto library is nearly 300 GB.

What I need to do is go through iPhoto and delete unnecessary photos. But since I do NOT have the time or ability to do that , I need a different solution.

I like the idea of copying the old photos over to an external drive.

*How can I do that???*

Related question: for folders on an external drive, is there a limit to the number of items (like individual photos/movies) allowed in each folder?

Thanks for the help!

🙂 Meg

P.S. Leaving the country in a couple of days, so need this figured out soon. 😉