Moving iPhoto 9.6 to EHD (WD My Book 1TB)

For iPhoto be sure that the EHD is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) and then

Moving the iPhoto library is safe and simple - quit iPhoto and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive - depress the option key and launch iPhoto using the "select library" option to point to the new location on the external drive - fully test it and then trash the old library on the internal drive (test one more time prior to emptying the trash)

And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto

And backup soon and often - having your iPhoto library on an external drive is not a backup and if you are using Time Machine you need to check and be sure that TM is backing up your external drive

For MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Numbers, Keynote or Pages documents simply drag them to the external drive - they do not have specific requirements - for other applications verify the procedure their forum

LN

You're looking at the software and not the photo Library.

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.

Regards

TD

You do NOT touch the iphoto application - you drag the iPhoto Library across - by default it is in yore pictures folder

drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive

LN

Ok

It was in your pictures folder until you or someone else moved it

We can not see what you have done - we can only tell you the default location, what you have one is on you

It is a really good idea to keep it in the default location to avoid future confusion

For now you may need to tell iphoto where it is inc you have moved it again - if you double click on it in its new location it will launch iPhtooa n iphoto will remember where it is until you move it or change to a differet library manually

LN

I'm having trouble doing this same procedure unfortunately.

It tells me it'll take five days to complete, but crashes after about 15 minutes or so with the following error message:

'The operation can’t be completed because an item is being modified.'

All I've done is drag the iPhoto Library over to the EHD, so why is something being modified?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

T

What format is the EHD?

Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

Option 1

Back Up and try rebuild the library: hold down the command and option (or alt) keys while launching iPhoto. Use the resulting dialogue to rebuild. Choose to Repair Database. If that doesn't help, then try again, this time using Rebuild Database.

If that fails:

Option 2

Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. (In early versions of Library Manager it's the File -> Rebuild command. In later versions it's under the Library menu.)

This will create an entirely new library. It will then copy (or try to) your photos and all the associated metadata and versions to this new Library, and arrange it as close as it can to what you had in the damaged Library. It does this based on information it finds in the iPhoto sharing mechanism - but that means that things not shared won't be there, so no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your events, albums and keywords, faces and places back.

Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

Regards

TD

Many thanks, Terence. I'll give that a go. I think I lost quite a few photos when I updated to Yosemite, as some of the event folders now only have one or two pictures in, as opposed to the 50+ I'd taken. So I'll probably need to go through Time Machine and see if old ones are still on there. My internal HD only has 2GB free now, so the Macbook Pro's almost completely ground to a halt!

Thanks again,

All the best,

Tim

My internal HD only has 2GB free now

Whoa!!!!

You have a major problem and it is going to get worse You may already have lost data.

OS X needs about 10 gigs of hard drive space for normal OS operations - things like virtual memory, temporary files and so on.

Without this space your Mac will slow down as the OS hunts for space on the disk, files will be fragmented, also slowing things down, apps will crash and the risk of data corruption - that is damage to your files, photos, music - increases exponentially.

Your first priority is to make more space on that HD. Nothing else can be done until you do.

Purchase an external HD and move your Photos and Music to it. Both iPhoto and iTunes can run perfectly well with the Library on an external disk.

It is very likely that the symptoms you describe - photos missing etc - are due to the disk being overfull.