Startup disk almost full

Well,

Isn't that the idea?

That you move your existing iPhoto library off of your internal hard drive and put it onto your external hard drive so you can delete the original iPhoto library off of your internal drive and have the your iPhoto library be on then external drive? Yes?

That way we can keep the internal hard drive from getting full, again with music, movies and photos?

There is nothing wrong with leaving the EHD constantly connected to your Mac.

How large is your EHD? Is it large enough to hold your iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto libraries?

We want to regain as much internal hard drive space as possible so your Mac runs better.

You can certainly start a new iPhoto library on the internal hard drive, but it will be a new library. iPhoto can only access one iPhoto library at a time.

So, if you want to start a new iPhoto Libary on your internal hard drive you can just trash and empty the iPhoto library from within your Pictures folder on your Mac's internal drive. When you launch iPhoto, you can just start a new iPhoto library in your Pictures folder on your Internal hard drive and start new.

If you ever want to access your other iPhoto library on the external drive, you will have to relink the external iPhoto library to iPhoto, to access it, again.

Basically you have to relink each iPhoto Library you create. You won't ever be able to merge them together.

If you ever want to archive a new iPhoto library on your Mac's internal hard drive to the external drive, again, you'll need to save the library in a new seperate folder so, you do not rewrite over the one that will already be present on your EHD.

IF you follow the instructions I posted, you CAN move the iPhoto folder.

This is not rocket science to do.

IF you screw up moving the iPhoto library the first time to your EHD, you still have your original iPhoto library on your Mac.

Hi Icelyn,

I'm pretty sure it's more your iMovie library that is taking alot of space... I'm bumping in pretty late but if you need to acess your material later on from a CD it will a headache... and not to mention the time you'll need to burn them. My suggestioin would be having an external hard drive to put your iMovie and iPhoto library. After transfering them on the Hard Drive everything will be keep intact. You can have several library but only load one at a time.

If I'm not wrong update are free for newer version of iPhoto and iMovie on the app store. The work flow will be a bit different but I highly recommend the update if possible.

Cheers! Hope this help...

If the drive has been formatted for use with your Mac using the Disk Utility app and you created a partition/s that are setup as Mac Extended Format with a GUID Partition Scheme.

Click on your EHD to open a window.

Take your Pictures folder on your Mac, hold down the option key, then with the mouse, click and drag the Pictures Folder over to your EHD to make a copy to the EHD.

Open up the Pictures folder on the EHD and double click the iPhoto Library icon.

That will launch iPhoto and link the iPhoto app to the iPhoto library on your EHD.

It is that simple.

If it works, then you are done and you can either delete the library on your internal drive OR you can burn disks to more permanently save your photos. Then delete it off of your Mac's internal drive.

Control (right) - click on the drive's icon on the Desktop to bring up the Info window for the drive. It will show the format:

Click on your EHD to open a window.

Open another new window and navigate to your Home folder>Pictures Folder and open the Pictures folder.

Once your Pictures folder is open find then icon that is labelled iPhoto library hold down the Option key, then with the mouse, click and drag the iPhoto Pictures library over to your EHD to make a copy to the EHD.

To get iPhoto to recognise the iPhoto library on the EHD, use the mouse, hold the Option key on the keyboard, then use your mouse and click the iPhoto app icon on your Mac in your Applications folder OR in the OS X Dock if you have the iPhoto app icon in the OS X Dock.

That will launch iPhoto and may bring up a window with a list to link the iPhoto app to the iPhoto library on your EHD.

If this list window appears, click on the iPhoto library listed that you moved to external hard drive.

It is that simple.

If it works, then you are done and you can either delete the library on your internal drive OR you can burn disks to more permanently save your photos. Then delete it off of your Mac's internal drive.

To check to see how your external hard drive is formatted, launch OS X Disk Utility, then in the left hand pane of DU, look for the name of the external hard drive and click once on it.

In the bottom center of the DU main window, there should be info saying/indicating, OS X extended ( journaled) drive and partition GUID should appear in that description, also.

It should not take this long.

Is your external hard drive a FIreWire Drive or a USB drive?

Even if it is a USB external hard drive, copying the files shouldn't take 24 hours.

Just let the copy/transfer continue. The time interval of the transfer may change as the data gets transferred.

Quit iPhoto. Try launching iPhoto, again, holding down the option key. A list window should be appearing.

Let me know the outcome.

If my last request didn't work,

I may have made a slight error.

Quit iPhoto.

Click on the external HD icon on your Mac's desktop to open a window on your EHD.

Create a new folder and Label it Pictures.

Locate where you put the iPhoto library icon

Simply, use your mouse to click once hold the button down and drag the iPhoto Library icon over the new Pictures folder you have created and let go of the mouse button.

This will copy the iPhoto library into this new Pictures folder.

Now try and launch iPhoto while holding down the Option Key on the keyboard.

The list should now appear when you launch iPhoto in this manner.