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!