Out of Space? Store Your Photo Libraries on an External Hard Drive

Intro
This article covers the steps of moving your iPhoto or Aperture library to an external hard drive, and discusses why you may want to have two external hard drives at your disposal if you choose to stow away your heavy photo library externally.

The good and the bad
One thing that I’m sure many people with limited space on their internal hard drive(s) will find wonderful about storing their photo library on an external hard drive is the potentially huge amount of internal hard drive space saved. You can find out how big yours is by  right clicking on it and selecting Get Info.

An obviously bad thing about having your photo library stored on an external hard drive is the inability to access the library when the external hard drive is disconnected. I personally don’t edit my photos while on the go, so that isn’t a problem for me. A solution for those people who want to access their photo library while on the go could be purchasing a dedicated portable hard drive to store their photo library on. If you use your laptop on the couch, this could be a pain.

Moving the libraries
So how do i move my photo library? The process can be split into the following four steps:

1. Finding library
2. Copying library
3. Connect copied library
4. Deleting old library

With the following method, the four steps for moving your iPhoto and Aperture libraries are identical, besides different file names for the libraries.

Finding the library
The default names, locations and looks for the libraries are displayed below. The iPhoto and Aperture libraries are stored as package files with dedicated icons. Look for the following icons in your Pictures folder:

If you have renamed one of the libraries or moved it somewhere else, and you can’t find it, you can try searching for it in Spotlight. Typing e.g. Aperture will find your Aperture library even though it’s named something entirely different!

Copying the library
Before doing this, make sure that you have a recent backup of your data. When moving such big files as libraries and reconnecting them, something could potentially go wrong, and you definitely want to be able to restore your precious data if that happens.

I assume that you have found the chosen library, and now have a finder window open displaying the library. Now open a new finder window (shortcut: command+N) and navigate to the desired location on your external hard drive. Drag and drop the library from your internal hard drive to your external hard drive. This will automatically copy the library  and not move it (which is far more risky and not recommended). This will take some time, depending on the size of the library and the speed of the connection to your external hard drive.

When done, don’t close any of the two finder windows.

Connect copied library
What’s left now is telling your application to use the new copied library located on your external hard drive, instead of your old library located on your internal hard drive. For iPhoto and Aperture, this is as easy as opening the new library (that’s right, just double click the icon and everything will be as it’s used to be).

When done, close the finder window displaying your new library, but don’t close the finder window displaying your old library just yet.

Deleting old library
When you have checked that everything works just fine, delete the old library (shortcut: command+backspace). When you are certain you will not need it, empty the trash to reclaim the new available space on your hard drive.

My insecure setup
I moved all of my media libraries to my external hard drive recently, but after doing so, I realized that my brand new and extremely space saving setup was seriously insecure. While having a great time finding the best way to move the libraries to an external hard drive, I had completely forgotten about backup.

I only own a single external hard drive, and that meant that my libraries were now on the same hard drive as the backups of the libraries! That left my libraries completely vulnerable to an eventual hard drive failure. I would not recommend having such a setup to anyone, since hard drive failures happen time to time.

As you may have guessed by now, my libraries are at the moment back to their default locations

The alternative setup
The above mentioned insecure setup can easily be avoided by keeping your libraries and backup on two separate hard drives. If you have an iPod with a hard drive large enough for your needs, you could very well use that to store your libraries on. Some people say that iPods get damaged from this kind of use, and it’s your choice if you want to take the risk. I have used my iPod for backup and huge transfers on and of for 3 years now, and it still works like a charm.

Other choices could be getting a second external harddrive or to opt for a RAID 1 setup with two disks if you want to save an USB port.

Have you found any setups that work great for you? Let us know in the Comments section below!


Bjørn Friese is studying Social Science and English in Denmark, and has an ever growing passion for computers and being creative.

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Your Comments:

You can do move your iTunes Library to an external hard drive.

In iTunes, open the Preferences. Select the Advanced Tab.
The iTunes Music folder location panel at the top, will show you the path to your existing library location.

Just hit the Change... button on the Right, navigate to your external drive and select the folder where you want to store your music. You can always create a new folder from that dialogue box.

Be sure to get a hard drive with FireWire, NOT USB2. USB2 is fine for keyboards and other input devices. For mass storage and large file transfers, FireWire is the way to go!

 Mr. Reeee
 06/21/2008  at  09:43 AM

@Mr. Reeee:

I'm at the moment writing a guide for doing just that, it will be on the site in near future

USB2 is theoretically faster than FireWire 400, but since real USB2 transfer speeds are slower than the theoretical USB2 transfer speeds, USB2 and FireWire 400 transfer speeds are about the same.

If you want higher speed than that, you will have to choose one of the following: FireWire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, ATA-133, or SATA-150.

For more info:
http://www.lyberty.com/tech/terms/usb.html

 Bjørn Friese
 06/22/2008  at  01:20 AM

This page is a typical of FireWire vs. USB2 discussion:
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=54422

The best thing to do is to get a hard drive with multiple interfaces, like a LaCie quad interface drive (FireWire 400, 800, SATA & USB2), then you can try and see which works best. But believe me, FireWire 400 outperforms USB2. And FireWire 800 is even better!

 Mr. Reeee
 06/22/2008  at  07:26 AM

@Mr. Reeee:

I totally agree with you and believe in what you're saying. FireWire 400 indeed outperforms USB2 in nearly all cases. The reason why i wrote that they are about the same is because they often are (FireWire is often, from what I've heard and seen, just about 20% faster).

But in Denmark, and i believe this is true in many other countries, external harddrives with USB2 interface is significantly cheaper than those with FireWire 400 interface, and my personal opinion is that FireWire 400 is not worth the money.
Therefore i wrote that they are about the same, since you where saying that "FireWire is the way to go!" which i don't think always is the whole thruth.

 Bjørn Friese
 06/22/2008  at  08:59 AM

Hi,I am a new Mac user and I have been looking at external hard drives but I don't know if I can buy any brand or if only some brands will work with the Mac OS. Do I have to format it a special way? Any other setup issues I might have?

 Greg Young
 06/26/2008  at  05:47 PM

Greg, check out this article for formats:

http://www.myfirstmac.com/index.php/mac/articles/1-external-hard-drive-for-your-mac-and-pc

Most major companies work fine with Macs. If it say it on the box, you should be fine.

 Chris Kerins
 06/26/2008  at  06:05 PM

I have copied my files to my external hard drive, very recently. I am not confident as to how all this works, so I am very reluctant to erase the existing data on my MacBook Pro, for fear of losing it.

For example, I copied all of my iPhoto application to the external drive. When I open the application, I can clearly see it is a duplicate open file, coming out of the external drive (2 iPhoto icons in the dock at this point). Anyways, when I go to test how this all works, i delete a photo from my internal drive iPhoto, and when I open my external drive's version of iPhoto, the same photo is missing there too. I am in need of some expert help! I am worried that once I move everything I could lose it for good?

Also, while I've got your ear.... I have copied my applications such as iPhoto to the external drive. Do I need to copy my photo library of actual pics as well, or did they automatically move in the copy of the application?

Thanks for your help!

 Sherry
 08/01/2008  at  04:42 AM

Sherry, I think you have confused the iPhoto application with the iPhoto library. You need to keep the application in the Applications folder. It's important to keep it there because other programs like Software update will go look for it there.

The point of the article is to move the iPhoto library from your User/Photos folder to a new spot. One way to test where your photos really are is to right-click on a photo in iPhoto and pick Show File. That should open a Finder window to where it is.

 Chris Kerins
 08/01/2008  at  08:45 AM

I strongly agree with your advice - if you keep your photos on an external hard drive, you need a 2nd external hard drive to use for backup.

I uploaded my photos to Amazon Jungledisk, and I'm glad I did, because my external hard drive is failing. I think I'll be able to copy them from the drive before it dies, but Bjørn, you're right on in saying that it's never wise to store anything important on only one drive.

Thanks for the article!

 Justin
 12/12/2009  at  09:58 PM

Thanks for the clear cut explanation. I have 180 gb drive that is full of digital photos. Purchased two 2 TB drives and set them up as mirrored raid. My intention is to move my aperture library to one of the 2 TB drives; having it back-up to the second. Does this all sound appropriate?

Also, I have probably 10 years worth of smaller drives (4-5 drives with older systems and older iPhoto software) around the house with various iPhoto libraries, albums, slideshows, etc.

How can I pool these all together for one nice, clean Aperture library without losing the metadata (photo date), corrections (red-eye, cropping, etc.) slideshows, etc.?

Thanks,
Carole

 Carole
 11/24/2010  at  05:48 AM

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