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How to Re-Locate the "iMovie Theater" Away from Boot Drive?

I have a 128 GB solid state drive for Mavericks and my apps. I have 2 TB of home movies stored on a 3TB internal drive. When I first started up the new iMovie 10, it asked if I wanted to upgrade my movies and I said yes. After grinding away for a while, my computer freaked out. The "iMovie Theater" file that is stored inside the Movies folder inside my home folder had grown to 30 GB and left exactly 0K on my 128 GB boot drive! I had to remove the boot drive, boot from a backup, and deleted the Theater file.


Does anyone know how to re-locate this Theater file to another drive?

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 6:26 PM

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23 replies

Sep 17, 2017 10:06 AM in response to Frank Su tw

Frank Su tw, Thank you for the trick to create a link (unix). I got the link created, but when I open up iMovie (Version 10.1.6), the "Theater" is still empty (I do have a a bunch of projects exported to the Theater before I moved the 20 GB file to an external drive)?


What am I missing or where am i going wrong? Any help is much appreciated. Thank you.

Oct 13, 2017 6:00 AM in response to Alan Cook2

Creating a symbolic link worked for me.
FYI other than using the unix command you can also download and use an app to create the symbolic link (like SymLinker).


Steps are as follows:

1. Move file or folder to a new location or drive

2. Open SymLinker and drag item to "Source" field

3. Browse to the Movies folder to create the "Target" to save link

4. Select "Create" to save the symbolic link in the Movies folder

Nov 1, 2013 12:19 PM in response to Alan Cook2

You also have the option to select File > Share > (then deselect "Add to Theater" if you so choose) > Next and choose the location you want to save the file. Simply click on the default folder presented and choose any location you like. This provides good control over where you want to save your finished projects outside of Theater.


Theater is just a way to provide an integrated and simple user interface.

Nov 1, 2013 2:55 PM in response to gturner121

1. Move the Theater file from your Movies folder (inside the home folder) to the new location.

2. Delete the Theater file from your Movies folder.

3. Go to Applications/Utilities and double-click on Terminal

4. Type in ln -s (note that this is lowercase LN -s followed by a space)

5. Drag the Theater file (that you put in the new location) to the Terminal window.

6. Still in Terminal type (or copy/paste) the following: ~/Movies/iMovie\ Theater.theater

7. Hit return.


Dragging the Theater file into the Terminal window fills in the path for you.

How to Re-Locate the "iMovie Theater" Away from Boot Drive?

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