How do I move my iPhoto files to an external harddrive?

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How do I move my iPhoto files to an external harddrive?

Hi there

I only recently moved to Apple from Windows and am struggling to move my iPhoto files to an external harddrive, despite there being some quite old discussions on this on these discussion boards.

My late 2013 32GB Macbook Pro Retina is currently at full capacity because I have imported to iPhoto all of my photos from my past few months of travel. I have recently acquired a 1TB external harddrive which I have successfully partitioned, and I have backed up my Macbook Pro's harddrive using Time Machine to one partition.

I want to move my iPhoto library to the other partition to free up space on the local hard drive, but am needing some assistance.

My questions are:

1. How can I locate all of my iPhotos that I can see in iPhoto but nowhere else? I thought there would be some place I could find them and drag and drop onto the external hard drive.

2. How do I go about moving the photos so they are only on the external hard drive? Do I have to move to the hard drive first and then delete?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks

Alex

MacBook Pro with Retina display, iOS 7.1.1

Posted on Jun 17, 2014 10:57 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,314 points

Jun 17, 2014 12:40 PM in response to alexbond

To move your iPhoto Library to an external drive is simple and straightforward:

Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

1. Quit iPhoto

2. Copy the iPhoto Library 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.

1. How can I locate all of my iPhotos that I can see in iPhoto but nowhere else? I thought there would be some place I could find them and drag and drop onto the external hard drive.

The point of iPhoto is that it replaces the File Manager for everything to do with your photos.

For help accessing your photos in iPhoto see this user tip:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4491

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Answer 2

alexbond Author

Level 1

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Jul 10, 2014 2:55 PM in response to Yer_Man

Thanks Terence, I only just got around to doing this, that was very straightforward! Thanks for your help.

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