Comments on: Liberating myself from my iPhoto library

By: Mark Dalton

Mark Dalton — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:26:51 +0000

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!!

By: Julian Waters

Julian Waters — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:05:00 +0000

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

By: Gregory Roth

Gregory Roth — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:59:39 +0000

Thanks for the tip, Veronica. This is a good idea and helpful.

By: Clintus

Clintus — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:40:07 +0000

great idea. I think I might have to do this pretty soon here, the library is getting fat.

By: Careyd

Careyd — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:56:13 +0000

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…

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:04:58 +0000

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

By: Darran.

Darran. — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:06:37 +0000

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.

By: Fahad Fateh

Fahad Fateh — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:08:14 +0000

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.

By: cmaese

cmaese — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:23:20 +0000

How can I transfer my photo albums from my Ipod classic to my mac?

By: Clay

Clay — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:33:25 +0000

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?

By: cchana

cchana — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:02:21 +0000

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.

By: Brajeshwar

Brajeshwar — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:36:46 +0000

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.)

By: Brajeshwar

Brajeshwar — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:32:58 +0000

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.

By: toine

toine — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:41:57 +0000

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.

By: Damien

Damien — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:00:49 +0000

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!

By: David

David — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:20:50 +0000

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/

By: Veronica

Veronica — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:38:47 +0000

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!

By: Careyd

Careyd — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:17:19 +0000

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?

By: John Bell

John Bell — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:12:50 +0000

Ah ha. Laziness wins every time!

By: Igor Sales

Igor Sales — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:06:46 +0000

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?