i just hooked up an external hard drive. my startupdisc is full. how do i move movies and photos to new hard drive?

The photo in iphoto is stored in a different place , not where you have.

so go to finder, picture, photo library and drag them to your hard drive.

for movies and music, go in iTunes , right click on the movie or music you want to move, select "show in finder", then you will find it.

iPhoto: How to move the Library folder to a new location

iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder

See also:

iPhoto: Issues with FAT32-formatted drives

Photos are a different application and different forum, iPhoto.

While possible it is not simple to selectively move only movies to another drive. You can try to consolidate selected content. Sept. 2010, Consolidate selected content - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2589812 and April 2014, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6067967?answerId=25414357022#25414357022

Unless you play a movie, then listen to 3 songs, then play another movie, then listen to another song, one alternative would be to set up a separate library only for movies that is located entirely on the external drive. This keeps it simple.

Hi - I have the same issue and have not found Apple's advice helpful. This however seems to work OK.

1 - quit iTunes

2 - copy the movies folder from the HD iTunes folder to your new external drive by dragging in the Finder (do not delete the original)

3 - re-open iTunes

4 - from iTunes prefs/advanced uncheck 'copy files to iTunes media folder....'

5 - select all the movies you want to move and hit backspace; saying 'yes' to deleting the files (but not to removing the cloud links)

6 - empty the trash (in Finder)

7 - in iTunes choose file/add to library.., find & select all the movie files on the external drive and say go (this is fairly quick - the files are not moved, just the local catalogue is created)

Everything now looks the same and you have only one library, but you have recovered your HD space (expensive Si for me!) and movies will play from the external disk (or not if it is not connected but no harm happens). This seems to work fine for me so far!

You will have to be careful about where newly purchased movies go but this is fairly straightforward. And note that the new movie folder will not backup (eg under Time Machine) unless you arrange this.

Notice what you do NOT do - iTunes help suggests having two iTunes libraries, one on the external disk for movies. So far as I can tell this is completely pointless - apart from its being tricky/tedious to swap libraries this does not in itself move any actual media files (just the library catalogue) and thus recovers no space. And any attempt to consolidate the external drive library results in the relevant movie files being downloaded to the external drive not from the HD but FROM THE CLOUD! This might work in Cupertino but on any reasonable broadband link it is silly.

It would really be nice if Apple were to provide a slicker way to do this as it seems to be a widely-wanted function.

Good Luck!

Will Stewart wrote:

...

Yes, you can do that, but you have essentially deleted the media from your library and then re-added it from another location after using a somewhat excessive way to tell iTunes not to copy it to your media folder. If you delete items completely you lose ratings, play count, and date added which some people like to keep. If you really want to do it this way you can temporarily override iTunes setting to copy media to media folder by holding down the option/alt key while dragging the media back into iTunes from the new location.

I don't think it is Apple suggesting multiple libraries, it is me. It does end up relocating current media because it is in fact an extension of your procedure. I suggest relocating the movies but instead of dragging them back to the same library they are added to a new library. I don't know that holding down an extra key at startup and selecting one extra file to switch libraries is truly tedious. Frankly once I view a movie it goes into storage for 8 years and I don't need to have it being part of the processing of the iTunes library every time I add another file to the library. Maybe if you watch Avatar every month for the past two years then you need it easily accessible constantly. The nice thing about not having it all in one library is if your internal hard drive is too small for movies but it big enough for music then you can split storage without iTunes complaining about broken links (your movies) if you do not want to have that external drive attached at all times.

I am not sure - the purchase dates and rights still look correct - and the 'fair play' number looks the same (3), presumably being this machine, my iPad and the house server which are all authorised. And remember that the cloud versions have not been deleted so one could replace from there any time (just slow). I do not choose ratings but I suppose one might lose these. But the positions-in-play are not lost (that is movies play from the last place viewed), nor the 'last played' time & date info - though I do not really use this, either. I guess this is all cloud-based too - my iPad knows somehow!

And sorry the advice re multiple libraries was not meant to be a comment on you! iTunes Help (on the machine not the WWW) has an item on 'use multiple iTunes libraries' which talks about video on an external HD but does explain why or how to save storage by doing this.

PS - and iTunes is cleverer than you think - if the drive is disconnected it does not complain about broken links unless one actually tries to play the missing movie, which since they are all 'missing' does not happen often.

And it looks much easier to me to have a single library with everything in it that I never have to change! And it is mildly helpful to know which movies one has without having to connect the external drive - though I agree this is not needed often.