Liberating myself from my iPhoto library

Oct 4, 2009 Author: Veronica | Filed under: apple

Today I decided to dump my 16GB iPhoto library onto an external drive. After tweeting about it, several people asked me how I went about it, so here’s a quick guide (for Mac users).

1. Close iPhoto.
2. Locate your iPhoto Library under User/Pictures/iPhoto Library.
3. Copy the folder by right-clicking or Ctrl-clicking.
4. Paste the entire folder into your external drive.
5. Go back to your original iPhoto Library and rename it to something like “iPhoto Library Old.”
6. Open iPhoto, and when prompted select the “iPhoto Library” from your external drive as the library you want iPhoto to use.
7. Once it loads up all of your images just fine from the external, go back and delete “iPhoto Library Old.”
8. All done!

Now, if you’re a laptop user, you’re not going to be able to view your photos unless you’re connected to the external drive. This is OK for me, but might be annoying to people who use iPhoto a lot, so make sure you’re cool with that before you do this!

This is also a good way of making a backup of your iPhoto library to an external drive. Now, commence rolling around in all that spare hard drive space like I did!

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26 Responses for "Liberating myself from my iPhoto library"

John Bell October 4th, 2009 at 5:42 pm 1

I’m curious why you don’t just get a bigger hard drive for your laptop rather than relegate media to an only sometimes accessible drive.
Veronica October 4th, 2009 at 5:44 pm 2

Laziness, John.
Shane October 4th, 2009 at 5:45 pm 3

If u hold down Option (or command, can’t remeber for sure) while launching iPhoto it will prompt u for which library to open. So u can have multiple iPhoto libraries
Tiffany October 4th, 2009 at 5:55 pm 4

I had to do this a month or two ago, since my library was approaching 120 GB! Getting all of that extra space back was amazing.
Reg October 4th, 2009 at 5:58 pm 5

Ditto the OPTION hint.

But for just 16 GB I wouldn’t even be moving it off my brand new Intel X-25 G2 SSD (160GB).

My 140GB iTunes library, however, first to go external.
Donggi October 4th, 2009 at 5:58 pm 6

Nice and easy tutorial. Thank you, Veronica. I also recommend to use “iPhoto Library Manager” for someone who needs to manage multiple libraries or quickly switch between internal and external libraries.
http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/
Igor Sales October 4th, 2009 at 6:06 pm 7

Shane, holding the “Alt/Option” key while clicking on iPhoto, will prompt you for which library to choose.

Veronica, do you know if you can use that library (and add/remove photos to it) from two different computers? Do you know if it can corrupt the libraries?
John Bell October 4th, 2009 at 6:12 pm 8

Ah ha. Laziness wins every time!
Careyd October 4th, 2009 at 6:17 pm 9

Holy cow I’m shocked you a)only have 16GB in your iPhoto Library and b)are only first doing this now! I would have thought someone like you would have tons more photos than that. Just calculating my iPhoto library (mine is stored on a mac mini at home with a big drive…because it’s too big for my laptops!, looks like I’m currently at 32,744 photos and ‘movie clips’ totalling 186.36GB!

I’m just a guy who takes photos of his friends and family…don’t even consider myself an ‘amateur photographer’, but have friends who are, and they’ve got terabytes of pix. But most people I know have at least 25-50GB of pix after 5-6 years of digital photo-taking.

You must have stuff stashed elsewhere Veronica?
Veronica October 4th, 2009 at 6:38 pm 10

Careyd, I just did a photo dump a couple of months ago, and backed up 3 years worth of photos onto external drives. So, this was the leftovers!
David October 4th, 2009 at 9:20 pm 11

You can also use iPhoto Buddy if you have multiple libraries across different disks, which I do because I’m cheap, and want to re-use old disks:

http://www.iphotobuddy.com/
Damien October 4th, 2009 at 10:00 pm 12

I’ve done something similar with my iTunes library in the past, but would of never thought to do this with my iPhoto library. Thanks!
toine October 4th, 2009 at 10:41 pm 13

I did it a year or 2 ago, with iPhoto and iTunes but my experience was that the start-up time is extreme long. And the programs become slow, so that is the reason why I don’t use this.
Brajeshwar October 4th, 2009 at 11:32 pm 14

I have iPhoto Libraries for each year, thus naming them — 2001, 2002 —– 2009. If I want to view any Library on my internal drive or External, I just hold the “OPTION” key when iPhoto starts and I can choose whichever library it should open.

Note: If you do not hold the key, it opens the last opened Library.
Brajeshwar October 4th, 2009 at 11:36 pm 15

Note of Caution:

iTunes when trying to sync with your iPhone Photos, will try to look up the last default opened iPhoto Library. So, just be cautious when using them together.

I do the same for iTunes Libraries, just press the “OPTION” key to select the Library I want to listen to. (I don’t want to carry all my songs on my Macbook Pro’s internal drive.)
cchana October 5th, 2009 at 12:02 am 16

awesome! i was planning to do this because I realised that most of the ‘missing’ space on my drive was down to iphoto!!! thanks for taking the time to post the tutorial.
Clay October 5th, 2009 at 4:33 am 17

I would love to do this, but the problem that I have is that I always end up wanting to show people some photos when I’m traveling with my laptop, and if I offload the photos, then how do I show them? How do you anticipate dealing with this problem? Or do you just put the ones that you want to show onto Flickr?
cmaese October 5th, 2009 at 5:23 am 18

How can I transfer my photo albums from my Ipod classic to my mac?
Fahad Fateh October 5th, 2009 at 6:08 am 19

Need Help!!

I have been posting to my blog almost 15 to 20 posts per week and I think that only few have reached you.

They are torturing me indirectly and want me to do it their way. Say/write what I they want me to.

Now my passport, id card and check book have been stolen.

I am not with ANY ONE and they are lying to you.
Darran. October 5th, 2009 at 8:06 am 20

Please back up your new iPhoto library somewhere, I know it sounds ridiculous but if you lose all your photos (as I pretty much did when my external drive crashed) you’d thank me.
Dave October 5th, 2009 at 10:04 am 21

Look into using Adobe Lightroom. It’s superior to iPhoto in a LOT of ways, but most notably, image management. It’s bery flexible, and allows you to mange your photos that reside on an external drive without the drive even connected!! (It’s really a database of photos, and you can do a lot without the actual source images in question.)

Just my $0.02.

-db
Careyd October 5th, 2009 at 11:56 am 22

Okay, now I’m scared that I have everything in one massive iPhoto library spanning about 9 years. Most of my stuff since 2005 when my first of 2 kids arrived. Hearing other people divide it down by year, etc. makes me wonder if I’m asking for trouble with a library as large as mine. Then again I sure like having it all in one place.

I do have Time machine keeping the whole thing backed up to another drive, plus occasional updates to another drive I store offsite. But it’s still all in one mega-library. Hmm…
Clintus October 5th, 2009 at 5:40 pm 23

great idea. I think I might have to do this pretty soon here, the library is getting fat.
Gregory Roth October 6th, 2009 at 3:59 am 24

Thanks for the tip, Veronica. This is a good idea and helpful.
Julian Waters October 7th, 2009 at 2:05 pm 25

You better hope you don’t get a power loss or crash while using it, I lost the lot that way. Some wasn’t backed up
Mark Dalton October 16th, 2009 at 10:26 am 26

I did this a while ago with my iTunes Library. Everything now lives on my Drobo and is accessible to all my Mac’s via my DroboShare.

An interesting hint over at macoshints states that with iTunes 9.x you can now access your library via multiple Mac’s at the same time (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090929160156850) although I haven’t tested this yet.

Will be doing it this weekend with iPhoto, and I will still have multiple TB’s of disk available on the Drobo not to mention on the Mac’s!!