How To Safely Move Your iPhoto Library to Another Hard Drive (Video Tutorial)

One more thing-is there any way I can confirm that when I do an Option click on iPhoto in the Dock that it is the iPhoto from my external drive that has opened? I also have answered my own question above by having iPhoto in my dock by using ‘Keep in Dock’ command.

Why yes! iPhoto is a little “different” now that Apple discontinued it for their newer Apple Photos application. But, that doesn’t mean they left people who want to use iPhoto (still) with no options.

Whenever a Mac user upgrades their operating system from a version of 10.10.2 or below, to version 10.10.3 or later, Apple’s new Photos application is installed to take over the job of their longtime iPhoto application.

When you first open Photos, it imports everything from your iPhoto library (though in a way that doesn’t occupy more disk space), and creates a new Photos library. From that point onward, anything you do in the new Apple Photos application won’t appear in the old iPhoto application, and anything you do in iPhoto won’t appear in Photos. It’s a one-time copy only.

So, it’s wise to choose one application over the other and stick with it. (And since iPhoto is no longer being updated/supported, it’s a far better choice and begin to start distancing yourself from iPhoto as quickly as you can)

The iPhoto application should not have been automatically removed from your computer. It should still be in your Applications folder (If it’s not, you can still get it back).

You can open your library file in iPhoto if you would like, or you can open it in the new Apple Photos application. They are interchangeable. If you launch iPhoto and your old library file doesn’t open, you need to manually tell iPhoto where it is and to launch with it (again). To open it in iPhoto, hold down the “option” key while clicking on the iPhoto application icon to launch it. This should bring up a menu to allow you to choose your library file.

However, if it wasn’t already updated to version 9.6.1, it will have a big “DO NOT” icon superimposed on the launch icon and you won’t be able to open it. This makes it seem as though you can never load it, but you can, you just will need to get it back by downloading the latest version of it before Apple stopped allowing you to do automatic updates through their system.
Here are the steps:

1. Delete iPhoto from your Applications folder (Or to be ultra safe, copy it to an external drive etc. so you have it, but it’s not in your application folder on your main drive)
2. Open the Mac App Store
3. Don’t search for iPhoto (It’s no longer in the Mac App Store) Instead, what you want to do is click on Purchased link at the top, and it should appear on the list of applications you’ve purchased or own. Click Install and it will be put back in your Applications folder.

Hope this helps you Mackytack!

Hmm, I’m not exactly sure what you mean by just “choosing bundles of photos.” You need to move the entire library file at one time in order to make sure you don’t risk corrupting your library file by going inside of it and trying to move stuff out of it manually.

Thank your for the wonderful compliments Yolande! 🙂

As far as your first question. It’s not just Apple, I believe Microsoft Windows works the same way. The idea, I believe, is that when you move a file from one folder to another on the same storage drive, then the operating system feels safe you are trying to just move the file, and you will know how to retrieve it later. If however, you move a file from one folder on one storage drive to a folder on a different storage drive, it’s programmed with concern for your well-being, and worries that if it doesn’t actually make a COPY of this file — instead of just moving it — that if you no longer have access to this other storage drive that you will no longer have access to the file anymore.

Additionally, and probably more importantly, if your operating system is actually USING that file for something (like Apple does with iPhoto or Photos with a library file), then if dragging and dropping it to another storage drive moved the file and didn’t copy it, then it’s possible the application will no longer be able to access that file you moved, because it can’t guarantee you will always have that storage drive plugged in at all times. So, it’s more about safety than it is anything else.

Second question: When you delete the an iPhoto library file, or move it, and iPhoto (or Photos) can’t find the library file on its own when you launch the application, then a window SHOULD popup when you launch iPhoto the next time, asking you to select/find another library file manually on your computer, OR, at the bottom there is a button to “Create New” library file. Just click that button and give your library a new name and location where you want to save/store it.

Or, another way, is before you click on the iPhoto or Photos application to launch it, hold down the “option” key on your keyboard, and keep it held down as you click to launch the application. Then that same window will popup, with the same option to “Create New” at the bottom.

Those are the tricks. 😉

Thanks Derrill! I appreciate that.

And no, it won’t affect photos on your iPhone. Backups can mean a lot of things though — backups of entire phone through iTunes, or backup of entire phone to iCloud… or it could mean backup of photos into iPhoto or Photos. But, in general, Apple doesn’t care where you store your iPhoto or Photos library. As long as iPhoto or Photos knows where it is, or you tell it where it is. If iPhoto is closed, and you move the library file manually to another storage drive, and then 2 months later you launch iPhoto, it may not know you moved it, and you will have to tell it where you moved it to by choosing that folder on that drive. And by default, backups of your iPhone through iTunes, go to your main storage drive — internal drive.

Thank you so much for your kind words Robert! That’s great to hear! 🙂

Same problem

Fatima, if you only have one iPhoto (Or Photos for anyone use this application, which works the same way) library file, and you move it to an external drive, then the only way to save files to your internal drive now, is to create a second iPhoto (or Photos) library file to contain photos in that location. Think of a library file like a folder to hold photos and videos, and it can only exist in one location.

If you hold down the option key while clicking on the iPhoto or Photos application icon to launch it, you will get the menu option to create a new library file, which you can name and save anywhere you’d like.

If you create a new library file, and start importing new photos and videos into it, and eventually it grows so large that now you need to move it as well, you can. Just make sure that you give your library file a unique name — different from your old one — so that when you move it to the same location as your old one, it won’t (as you pointed out) overwrite the old one.

When you install macOS 10.10.3 or later, you were “upgraded” to Photos and a new library file for Photos was created — hence your question. At the time the second library file was created, in almost all cases, the two library files are identical, except for the fact that the old one is to be used exclusively use by iPhoto (should you choose to still use it for whatever reason), and the new one is used exclusively for Photos.

Additionally, what’s interesting about the two folders is that even though they may and should have a very similar sized file size (usually in the many gigs if not hundreds of gigs), even though the files inside are the same, they aren’t taking up twice the space. Apple explains the “magic” in laymen’s terms as this:

“When you migrate a photo library from iPhoto or Aperture, the Photos app creates a new library structure but doesn’t duplicate your images. Instead, Photos saves disk space by creating links to the original and preview versions of your images.

When Finder reports the file size of your Photos library, it includes all your originals and previews. It may look like your remaining iPhoto or Aperture library is taking up twice the space on your hard drive, but it isn’t—your images exist only in one location, even though you may have more than one photo library.

After you migrate your iPhoto or Aperture library to Photos, you might feel tempted to delete your original iPhoto or Aperture library. Because the migrated library takes little additional space, you don’t need to delete the original library.

You can still use your original photo library with iPhoto 9.6.1 and Aperture 3.6 after you’ve migrated it to Photos. Any changes you make in iPhoto or Aperture after you migrate to Photos, like image edits or album changes, will be visible only in iPhoto or Aperture.”

So, what this means in the big picture is after you start using one application over the other, such as if you add a new group of photos to the Photos library file using Photos, the newly imported photos will not be in your iPhotos original library file (folder). They are two separate library files and should be thought of as that way.

Oh and thanks for the compliments of my video. I appreciate that! :coffee:

Charlie, new photos will be stored in whichever library file you import them to manually, or which library file you have set to be your iCloud drive library where new photos automatically sync to. You can have as many library files as you want — or just one. And each one can be stored wherever you’d like the file to be. But, when you load Photos (or iPhoto) by clicking on the application icon, it will default to loading to the last library file you had opened. So, be careful if you are in the right library file before importing images.

And keywords are the choices you use are stored inside of each library file. So, yes, keywords will go with your library file when you move it.

Hi there Jo. I’m not sure I follow your question. I want to make sure I understand before I possibly suggest the wrong thing. When you say “masters folder”, which folder exactly do you mean?

Most people have their iPhoto application setup to store all of their photos inside of their iPhoto library file. And so their master copies of their photos are saved in a masters folder, inside of this iPhoto library file. But, your library file is now on an external hard drive correct? So tell me more about what your master’s folder is and where it’s currently located, that you also want to move to this same external storage drive.

I guess I can’t figure out why your photos aren’t already in your library file on this ext. storage drive.

Melanie, are you pressing option to select a different library file to open at startup?

If so, maybe it’s because you aren’t holding the option key down long enough. You need to hold down option and then click on the iPhoto (or Photos) application icon and then don’t let go until you see the menu that comes up asking which library file you would like to open.

Hi Jan,

#1 – Yes. #2 – Yes. Assuming that the copying was performed without a hitch.

My question you though is, have you already copied all of the photos from inside the package, or are you just thinking about doing it this way?

Copying the originals (Masters folder on newer versions of iPhoto) is a quick way to make a backup of all of your original photos in the state they were in before you imported them into iPhoto from the start. And there are lots of reasons you would want to do this.

However, copying the modified folder may not be the best approach to guarantee you have a full set of your photos as they were modified (edited) inside of iPhoto.

Edits such as adding titles, captions, and other attributes that weren’t saved down to any/all of your photos in the new form in the modified folder, will remain in the “data” files inside the iPhoto library package contents. But, if you instead were to select all of your photos inside of iPhoto, then do a File > Export process, then you could specify and guarantee the information you’ve entered goes along with you to your PC. You can also do nice tricks like rename the original file name as the “title” you gave the photo(s) inside of iPhoto.

Some of this information possibly was written to the modified photo files. But, you will need to do some checking to make sure all of the information you might want did in fact get saved down to them. At least be sure. If you would rather play it safer, I would do the “File > Export” process instead.

Thanks Bill! Very kind of you to take the time to say. :beer:

Hi Karen.

It’s a bit complicated, but it boils down to this. iPhoto is an application that is written to display a type of metadata stored in photos EXIF and IPTC. When you are looking at photos or files in the OS X “Finder” application, Apple is only showing you metadata about that particular file — NOT the photo inside of the file — which is the EXIF and IPTC metadata. Finder only shows you the date the file itself was created, modified etc. It really would very nice of them to give us an option to display EXIF and IPTC metadata fields in Finder, but that may never happen, not when other photo viewing applications do it for them.

So, if you move your iPhoto collection, all of the metadata inside the photo(s) will go with it, but you won’t be able to see the “date the photo was taken” outside of a program (like iPhoto) that is written to display the camera metadata fields.

Hi Niki. So you’re trying to move your iPhoto library (folder) that is loading fine in iPhoto, but it’s not in your “Pictures” folder on your main storage drive, so you can’t move it yet. Is this correct?

If so, there are probably several ways to locate it. Let’s do it this way. Load up iPhoto, click on (select) a photo, and then go up to File > Reveal in Finder > Original (or modified). Now it will bring up a Finder window with your photo image file inside. This will now tell you a path (breadcrumbs) at the bottom of the window where your library file (photos) are located.

If you aren’t seeing the path at the bottom of Finder, then it’s because you have path turned off. Click Option+Command+P, or in Finder go up to View > Show Path Bar.

Also, if you were wondering, it’s okay if you don’t keep your iPhoto library in the Pictures folder in your users account. This is the default location, but you can actually store it wherever you would like. It’s up to you.

Hi Niki. If you are still having this issue since you wrote me, you need to check out one of these two resource pages I created, depending on your situation. So, check out both and at the top under “Issue:” decide which situation fits you best (It’s likely it’s the second one I’ve listed if your only iphoto library you’ve found has a file size of 40GB’s. That means the masters are probably inside and just not showing up):

https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/resources/iphoto/photos-disappeared-missing/how-locate-missing-original-iphoto-photo-library-file-computer/
https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/resources/iphoto/photos-disappeared-missing/photos-in-library-not-showing-in-iphoto/

Yeah Joseph, there certainly isn’t a reason you can’t move your iPhoto library file to your external drive that Time Machine is using (assuming there is adequate space for Time Machine’s backup to keep growing in size comfortably). Couple things to keep in mind though:

1) Now Time Machine can’t include your iPhoto Library file as part of the hourly backup. So, you will be on your own to make sure you do incremental backups to another hard drive or at least use an offsite cloud backup service like Backblaze (that’s the one I use).

2) Since we are talking about irreplaceable photos in your Photo library, make sure the external hard drive you are using is a dependable brand and model. I know this is subjective, but basically I’m just saying don’t use one that you question whether it will be reliable.

You’re so welcome Maria! :coffee:

Hi Kaylee.

The most straightforward way to open this duplicated library file is to load up iPhoto and then go up to the top in the menu bar and click “File>Switch to library” and then a new window will pop up. Click on the button that reads “Other library” and then in the next window, click through to find your new library file name on your external, select it and then click on open.

Is this what you did? And if so, is this what brought up sub-folders? I wouldn’t think so. Sounds to me like you right clicked on the library file itself and selected “Show Package Contents.”

If this method doesn’t work, try double-clicking on your new library file with iPhoto closed, and that should manually launch this library file into iPhoto.

Give those a try and let me know. 🙂

You’re welcome. 🙂

You said you transferred a bunch of photos and videos but you didn’t say how… did you move the single library file? Or did you somehow move separate video files and photos?

If you just moved the single library file, then if your videos were copied inside of the library file when you initially imported them (possibly years ago), then they would go with your library file and should load just fine.

The only thing I can think of is if you did any upgrading to your OS or iPhoto in this recent process of moving your photos. There was an issue with older versions of iPhoto (8 I believe) using an older version of quicktime player 7 to play videos. It’s possible if you are still using an older version of iPhoto on a newer version of OS X, then maybe that’s why they aren’t playing.

If none of this is helpful, is there anything else you can tell me about the time frame between when your videos worked last until now that I could use to diagnose what may have happened?

Hi Marcia. It could take some time to copy — hours if you are using an older USB2 external drive, or if your internal drive is slow (5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm). So, just let it go for a bit and see if that 12 hour number goes down a bit. It could have just hit a lot of large files and it’s estimating 12 hours thinking that many of the remaining files are just as big.

Your new photos will import within the iPhoto application to whichever library file you have open at the time of importing. iPhoto can have as many libraries as you would like, each with their own library file. The only stipulation is you can only have one loaded at a time. So, just load whichever library file you would like new photos to go into at the time, and then do your import.

To switch to a different library file, you just double click on the library file in Finder with iPhoto closed. Or, if iPhoto is loaded, go up to File and choose Switch to library from the list and choose one of your other library files. This menu here is also where you can create a new library file and choose where to save it.

Hope this helps! :coffee:

Jen, glad to hear! If you want to keep some of your photos on your main storage drive, but all of the other ones in another location, this requires having 2 photo libraries with unique photos inside.

So, once you make a copy of your main library to your external, I would rename the second one — or even both — so that the library names are unique and mean something to you. Then load up each one and remove the photos inside you don’t want to be in that library. (obviously be very careful not to delete the wrong ones)

You don’t want to do it picture by picture of course, but you can delete entire events at a time from the event view which will save you a lot of time. Or you can select a LOT of photos at a time by selecting the first in a list, then hold down shift and then click on the last. This will highlight a lot of photos at a time between the range of two photos that you can then delete.

Hi Abby.

Lots of questions in there! Let me see if I can answer some of them.

Time Machine:
Yes, I think it’s best to not use a Time Machine drive for multiple things unless it’s really spacious and you really know what you’re doing. Time Machine works best when it’s a lot bigger in space than your drive(s) you are backing up to it. Some people suggest double the size. And once it gets close to being full, it starts deleting older versions of files which means you won’t have access to those versions anymore. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it could be if it’s starting to delete fairly recent versions of files you would possibly want to have the ability to recover.

iCloud Storage:
The latest upgrades Apple has done for OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 allows you to now use your cloud storage you are buying through them for your iPhone, to use as iCloud Drive storage for computer files — even on your Mac. So, think of it as just one big drive in the cloud that you are paying for that you can use for all of your Mac products to save to. You have to enable it on each product separately, and it’s best to do it on all or none. And you want to do all, you have to make sure you are on these latest versions of the OS’s or it won’t work. But, it’s the future for Apple, so I would take advantage of it if you can — especially since it’s not too expensive for the space. And you can save whatever you would like to it (just like you can with services like Dropbox.com and Box.com). So this does mean you could backup pics to it if you wanted to (and you purchased enough space).

iPhoto library moving:
iPhoto is an application, and iPhoto library files are what are loaded into iPhoto. You can have as many library files as you want, but only one library file can be loaded into iPhoto at a time.

What it sounds like you want to do is create a new library file on your current drive, so it’s empty and ready to start accepting your new photos for import. But, you then want to move your current iPhoto library to an external drive to free up some space. So, like I show you in the video, you want to move the file and then check and double check to make sure this new library file loads fine over there, and THEN you can delete your original one. You can double click on a library file to load it into iPhoto (if iPhoto is closed at the time). Or you can use “File > Switch to Library” to load up a different library file. (This is also where you can create a new library file)

I think this method is easier then moving your original library file, and then deleting the photos inside the library file on your original hard drive. I would just move library “A” to external drive. Create “B” on original drive. Check to make sure “A” is working on new external drive. Then delete “A” from original drive. Now use new library “B” to import new photos to.

I wouldn’t call them “A” and “B”, but I would rename your library files so they each mean something to you and you can recognize them both by name. They don’t have to be called “iPhoto Library.” That’s just the default name.

Hi Amanda. The tutorial video shows you how to move your “managed” iPhoto library from one location to another. It moves all of your photos as well as videos that are being managed inside.

However, IF you have imported any photos as “referenced” where your master images and videos are instead being stored outside of this contained library file package, then those will not be moved. By default, iPhoto is setup to import all photos and videos as managed. So, as long as you haven’t gone into Preferences > Advanced and changed the “copy items to the iPhoto library” setting at any time before an import, then all of your photos and videos will be managed.

If you aren’t sure how this setting works, I made a video about it here: https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/iphoto-imported-photos-iphoto-library-managed-referenced/

There is no need to copy the iPhoto software. The application itself will always be in the application folder for you, and should it ever not be, you can re-download it through the Mac App Store or through the install DVD’s if your Mac is an older model.

Hi Miranda. Hmm.. That’s a bit strange. I just tried it again on my iPhoto (version 9.5) holding down the “option” key while then clicking on the iPhoto application icon in the Dock down at the bottom and iPhoto launched with the window for me to choose which library file I wanted to open.

Are you clicking on the library file itself with “option” held down, or the iPhoto application icon? You want to do this with the application icon.

If this still doesn’t work for whatever reason, once iPhoto is loaded, just click on the “File” menu at the top and then from the list that comes down, choose “Switch to Library” that’s about 3/4th’s of the way down.

Alternatively, you can just double click on the correct iPhoto library of choice in the Finder application and this will force iPhoto to load with that exact iPhoto library file. Once you close iPhoto, whatever iPhoto library file you had currently loaded at the time will be your “default” iPhoto library file and will load up automatically the next time you load iPhoto.

Hope this helps! :coffee:

You’re welcome! And thanks for taking the time to let me know Kate! So glad to hear I could help you. :coffee:

Hi Tracie. I’m not as familiar with Carbonite as I am with Backblaze (the one that I use to backup my data to the cloud), but I did a little looking around Carbonite’s website and they have a support page that says that it can backup iPhoto library files if it’s selected to do so (you may have accidentally told it not to backup that file at one point). So you might want to check out this article if that interests you.

Hmmm… I’m not aware that iPhoto ever shows you the photos’ “date taken” as the date the file was created. That’s weird. Can you link to a screenshot, or possibly email me through my contact me page a shot of where it’s displaying this wrong date information. In my experience, in the info panel of iPhoto, it always is showing the EXIF metadata for when the photo was taken. Then, if you want to change this date and time if it’s wrong, you change it through “Photos > Adjust Time and Date” or “Photos > Batch Change.” Both of these will, in my experience, alter the date shown on the right in the info panel.

And in case this helps, my Max is OS X, 10.5.8 and iPhoto is 7.1.5 (378). I just read the side of the box on my passport and it says is requires reformatting for Windows OS (is already formatted for Lion or Mountain Lion). However, when I “command I” the external harddrive icon, it tells me it is formatted: Mac OS Extended (Journaled). It also says I’ve used 72.63 GB of space on disk. Isn’t that the pictures? Where can they be?

Oh I am terribly sorry! I found the answer about reformatting in the comments… Should have looked more carefully before I asked! Now my question is: 1 partition only correct? I can’t do 2 partitions apparently… so I can’t randomly start making new folders and add files to this hard drive afterwards, correct?

Hi Yvonne.

I have a 4TB WD USB 3 drive I just got and use for my Time Machine drive.

It was pre-formatted for Windows when I bought it. So, the first thing I did was use Drive Utility and reformatted it as “Extended – Journaled” so that it could be used on my Mac computer. I left it as one partition, but you could theoretically make it multiple partitions if you wanted. (See instructions in your other comment)

I just tried copying something to this drive (after Time Machine has been used on it for a couple weeks now), and it worked. It copied just fine. The only unique thing is that it asked me to authorize the copy by typing in my password. But, that could possibly be just because I have the drive set up to be encrypted and the access key (password) is stored in my iCloud keychain.

The space Time Machine uses grows though over time, so by partitioning your drive, you will force it into a partition that could potentially be too small later. So, something to keep in mind. You can add partitions later, but I believe you can’t re-allocate drive space from a partition you delete later to another partition. So, if you partition a 4 TB drive as 2 2TB partitions, and later decide to delete 1 partition, you will now have a drive with just 2TB’s available. You would have to move contents off of this drive, and then reformat it as a single 4TB drive to get that space back.

Yeah, having a backup of your iPhoto Library file is tricky for the reason you mentioned. If you update one library file with new photos, the photos will not be added to your second one. Some people drag and drop their library file to their external drive routinely to “update” the second copy on the external drive, but all this does is forces your computer to copy OVER your old library file with the ENTIRE library file again — which could take hours if your collection is sizable.

If you have a roomy cloud-service like Dropbox or iCloud Drive (Apple’s new update to iCloud), you could in theory store you library file in one of these folders and then there will always be a backup on this cloud server that you could rely on. I have my Aperture collection of all of my scans in Dropbox (and possibly soon iCloud Drive.. I haven’t had time yet to try this out yet).

Another option, and sorry is bit more technical, is to use a cloning program. I use a program called “Carbon Copy Cloner” to do this with my collections. Basically here’s what you can do. You tell it what you want to clone and from where, and then tell it where you want to keep a clone of it — which second drive location. Now, it will copy (clone) all of this to this new place. But here’s what separates this from the above steps of just copying it. Whenever something is new in the source location, you just re-run this cloning procedure and it will update the destination location with whatever is NEW. So in this case, it wouldn’t copy the entire library file again, it would just look to see what’s new and copy just that until both copies are identical! And what’s also cool, is you can set the built in scheduler so that it could do this for you automatically at set times – once a day, once a week etc.

Link to CCC Software: https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/carbon_copy_cloner-company

This is so important and useful, I really need to make a tutorial for people showing them how to use this software. It’s not too hard to use really, but, I know it’s scary when you’re dealing with copying one-of-a-kind media. You don’t to feel afraid to use it for fear that if you press something “wrong,” it will delete all your stuff! So, I’m adding this near the top of my list of things to do for this website. 😉

But, I do recommend having your photo collection in 2 places minimally — 3 or more is better. If you have only 2 places, it’s best to not have both of them in the same location (house/apartment). If your home is ever involved in a fire/flood, then both of your copies could be at risk. This is why cloud backups are nice (and usually work without you thinking about it). A second copy could be put in a safety deposit box, or stored safely at a family members house.

Hope this helps — cheers!
Curtis

Awesome — happy to hear it was useful for you! :coffee:

Hi Holland John. It depends on how you are using Dropbox and iPhoto. If you copied/moved your entire iPhoto library file to dropbox and are using dropbox to constantly be keeping a cloud backup of your entire library file, then you certainly don’t want to “delete all of your photos from Dropbox” (your iPhoto library file) because that will most certainly delete them all from iPhoto as well.

But, if you have kept your iPhoto library in the default location — your pictures folder in your user folder — or any other place on the main part of your hard drive, then you more than likely at one point used the feature inside of the Dropbox preferences “Import” tab area to “Import Photos from iPhoto..” (as the button reads). Instructions how to do this: https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/1963

I’ve never used this feature before, but it’s my understanding that it’s a one-time only copy (duplication) of your photos from iPhoto into the top-level folder of your Dropbox folder and will name the folder “Photos from iPhoto.”

If you have the space in your Dropbox account, this is also a great way to “evacuate” from iPhoto if you ever want to start using another non-destructive image manager like Aperture or Lightroom because it will put all of your photos in subfolders that correspond to the events from your iPhoto library.

So, if this is how you got your photos initially into Dropbox, then deleting them in Dropbox won’t affect your copies in iPhoto. One way you could be sure, if it makes you feel safer, is to delete just 1 or 2 from Dropbox first, and then check iPhoto to be sure they weren’t deleted there as well. If for some unusual reason that they were, you could then pull them out of the OS X Trash immediately. But again, I’ve never read there is any kind of a link or “sync” between Dropbox and iPhoto that deleting in one “application” deletes in the other. So, you should be good.

Hi Wendy. Thank you for the compliments! :coffee:

When you try and create a new library file, it will ask you where you would like to save it in addition to what you would like to call the library file. So, if you select a location (such as an external drive) to save your new library, and it won’t let you create it there because you don’t have access privileges, then it’s probably because the destination location (drive) has access privileges previously set to not allow certain users to read or read and write to this drive.

Select the drive icon for the problematic drive on the Desktop (or in Finder if your drives aren’t set to display on your desktop) and press Command-I to open the “Get Info” window. In the last panel – Sharing and Permissions – set the options under the Privilege columns to “Read & Write” for at least your user account under the Name column.

If you can’t change these because they are greyed out, then you need to click on the lock icon at the bottom right to unlock your settings (and possibly type in your computer user account password to verify who you are). After making the privilege changes, you can click the lock icon again to re-lock your settings.

Give this a try and see if this is the solution. 🙂

Hi Genevieve,
Thank you so much for your kind compliments! Let me see if I can be of personal help.

You said you’ve been moving a lot of your photos to your terabyte (I assume external hard drive). Does this mean what is on your external hard drive that is “sick” — a Finder folder with pictures not an intact library file – is the only place these moved photos exist? Or, is your library file on your main computer still 100% intact and working perfectly with ALL of your photos in it?

The question I am really getting at is do the photos on your external need to be re-built/repaired into a new library file because they are the only place some or all of the photos exist? Or can we just basically wipe clean your moved photos onto your external drive, and then move your existing working library file from your main drive to your external drive?

Understanding this is the starting point for me to help you figure out your next move.

Oh, and it seemed to open fine on my personal Macbook. But before I deleted the original off my Macbook, I wanted to double check to see if it would open on my work Macbook (which it won’t).

Hi James. So happy to hear my tutorial made the experience of moving your library file so much easier. :coffee: Thank you for letting me know.

Moving your Time Machine backup folder IS possible to move in this manner, but it will probably take a few more steps. You will need to turn off Time Machine first. You will need to make sure the drive you are copying the backup to is formatted with a “GUID Partition Table.” In Disk Utility, it will show at the very bottom under “Partition Map Scheme” if it is or not. And I believe you will also need to have the disk permissions for this drive is unchecked for “Ignore ownership on this volume.” I would make sure you put the backup in the top-level of your drive just like your original drive — not buried in a subfolder somewhere.

Once you move the backup, you will then need to go back into the Time Machine preferences and select the “Select Disk Button” and tell it you now want to use your new drive, or when you turn Time Machine back on, it will continue to write to the original drive you’ve been using.

Aww thank you! 🙂 Glad I could help you out. :coffee:

So glad it helped you Maia. 🙂

Hi MearaMay.

Why yes, you could copy all of your iPhoto libraries onto your wireless HD and access them from there. I’ve never used one of these before, so I can’t speak for the experience using one. But, I’m aware they are out there, mainly for the purpose of accessing lots of files with mobile devices like iPhones and iPads. They create a “wifi” spot (as a hub) and then multiple devices can connect to it and access the data on it.

The iPhoto application itself cannot merge multiple iPhoto libraries into one (though iPhoto Library Manager can), but if you just want to have multiple libraries on your external drive and then access each of them one at a time, I don’t think that will be a problem. I would rename each library file though so they have a unique and informative name that you can easily recognize.

Now, if you want to hear any concerns I might have, they would be about reliability and increasing the chance of loss. If you have an internal drive inside of a computer storing you irreplaceable photos, the odds of the hard drive being dropped on the floor go down. A small portable external drive however, can easily be victim to being dropped on the floor, coffee spilled on any open port of the enclosure, being lost or forgotten somewhere. (This is possible. Just ask any taxi cab driver what they’ve actually found left behind in their cabs before.)

And then the ultra-conservative side of me wonders about the technical disadvantages of wireless drives since I have never used one myself. For example, if your drive runs on battery, and you are running it this way, I would worry that the battery could run low in the process or writing new information to it causing an incomplete written file somewhere. I would hope the drive is very smart and is aware of these possibilities and won’t allow you to run it when it gets low.

If you are using a wireless speaker, for example, and there is interference, you literally hear interference or the audio drop out. So if there is any kind of “interference” while you are copying photos to this drive, does the drive perform a “checksum” at the end to make sure there was a 100% reliable bit-for-bit transfer? Or does it just assume it copied correctly.

These are just questions that come up in my head when someone like yourself asks me what I think about relying on this “bleeding edge” tech to store their irreplaceable photos.

I don’t mean to scare you off using a wireless drive, just to bring up any possible cons to go along with all of your pros you already have. Just whatever you do, have a plan to backup this external drive so this isn’t your only copy. I love using Carbon Copy Cloner to make incremental backups of my hard drives, as well as Backblaze for “set it and forget it” offsite “cloud” backups.

Hope some of this helps ya MearaMay! :coffee:

Hi Maia. I really wished I had taken a few more seconds in the video to explain why I said that about only using an external drive “temporarily.” I was just trying to keep the video short so those with short attention spans wouldn’t fear watching it. This is a concern all of us video creators have to deal with.

The reason why I said this is because for many people, external drives could potentially “open up the door” for a lot of problems when your one of a kind and often irreplaceable photo collection is at stake.

If someone buys a really inexpensive “off brand” external hard drive, and there are a lot of them out there, this increases the likelihood that it might crash, because these are built for people on budgets, not long-term reliability. And if they don’t have a current backup of this drive, they could easily lose some or even all of their photos. And I think it’s fair to say many many people don’t do proper backups.

Or, because it’s external, some might bring it with them from room to room or back and forth to Grandma’s house or to the office etc. This increases the odds for accidental drops and or even losing it. Then with external drives, there is also a chance for spills into exposed open ports of the drive if it’s too close to where you put your coffee cup in the morning.

So it’s not that external drives by definition are worse than an internal drive, I just didn’t want to recommend them over their perfectly good internal drives for most people, because they could compromise the integrity of what could be your only copy of your photo collection. That’s all.

If you have a nice reliable external drive that you enjoy using, by all means use it. Just practice good sound backup procedures on it like you do your internal drive(s) and you will be just fine. 😉

You’re welcome! Hope it helps you. :coffee:

Hi Gwen, thank you for the compliments of my video! I appreciate that. 😉

I’m not sure I exactly understand your question, but I think it’s because you might be assuming that something is going to happen that isn’t. So let me just sum up what’s going to happen.

So, if you follow the instructions in my video verbatim, then if you have 1,000 photos inside of your library file, and you move it from your main drive (lets call A), and you move it to an external drive (B), then now you have a library file on A with 1,000 photos, and a library file on B with 1,000 photos. The library file is exactly the same on both drives. At the end of the video, I tell you that after you check to make sure that the library and photos load correctly on drive B, that you can delete the library on drive A. This is because the purpose of moving the library is usually for people who want to clear up all of that disk space on their main drive. So they want 0 photos on drive A, but ALL of their photos on drive B.

So, if you want to just add new photos to your external drive, then it sounds like you want to create a new (second) library file correct? That way all of your old photos stay on your A drive, and then if you want to look at new photos, you would load up a second library file on your B drive. If this is the case, then after you load iPhoto, you click File>Switch to Library and then from the new window, you click “Create New” and then you tell it to create this library on your external drive (B) somewhere. (Call it something different like “iPhoto New Photos” or something so you can tell the difference between the two)

Inside of the new library, you can import new photos. Whenever you want to switch back to the other library, you go back to the File>Switch to Library window and then choose the other library file that’s still being stored on drive A. It will close out of one and go into the other. (You can only have one library file loaded at a time)

If you were wondering, there is no way to automatically maintain 2 different locations of the same library file at the same time, and just have new photos go into one place. You have to pick one place for a library file and import directly into that one library file at a time.

Does this clear things up for you? If it doesn’t, let me know and I can answer more for you about it. 🙂

You’re so welcome Jim!

It sounds to me like iPhoto is just not playing well with “dragging and dropping.” I was just talking with someone who spent some time at the Apple Genius Bar dealing with some big problems with their iPhoto collection, and she was told not to ever drag and drop photos into iPhoto, but instead to use the File > Import function instead. So, maybe this is also true with taking photos out.

Instead, I would suggest you try the File > Export route and see if this makes it better for you. Maybe this will cause it not to force a transcoding to the .jpg format.

And as far as moving your collection, as long as all of your masters are being stored inside of your library files, moving the library file isn’t going to do any converting. I believe it’s the dragging and dropping process you are doing out of the iPhoto application itself that is doing the converting. So, moving the library file is just going to change the location of where the library is stored.

Try moving the library file and testing it out — making sure you are loading that library file and not your original one. As long as everything seems fine over days or weeks, however long you want to test it to make sure it’s okay, then consider deleting the original copy of your library file off your main hard drive.

You’re so welcome Juli — glad to hear it helped you out! :coffee:

Why thank you Bobby! That’s so nice of you to stop in and say. I really appreciate that! 🙂

Why thank you Bobby! That’s so nice of you to stop in and say. I really appreciate that! 🙂

Hi Hayleigh,

I felt like I needed to take notes reading your comment. 🙂 It looked like one of my comments back to someone. 😉 I’m just messing with you. This is all good, it really shows that you are seeking out the best for your photos and you want to be confident in the steps ahead. I like that.

DRIVE FORMATTING:
It’s my understanding (and from experience), that any hard drive that you buy in a store off the shelf will work with either a Mac or a Windows PC. The only difference is when a drive says it’s “for Mac,” this means it’s been pre-formatted in Apple’s HFS file format. If you buy one that doesn’t say “For Mac,” then that means it will work on a Mac, but as you suspected, you have to re-format it first to HFS from Window’s NTFS file format before you start copying anything to it.

I obviously need to do a video on my website that teaches you how to format drives, since I don’t have one. I just looked on YouTube, and here’s one with 100k+ views that seems decent. The nice guy’s a little nervous, but does a good job covering the basics 😉 http://youtu.be/WzQF0Qo5Kv0

If you no longer have the packaging your hard drive came in, the easiest way I know to tell you to see what type of file system your drive is formatted with, is to click on your drive icon on your desktop, or click on it in a Finder window, and then hit “command-I.” This will bring up a small info window about your drive. In the general section at the top (you may have to click on the triangle to get it to open up the info), next to “Format:” it will tell you. Mine I just tried says “Mac OS Extended (Journaled).” This is what you want exactly. It doesn’t say “HFS”, Apple tries to use slightly less confusing language with their customers directly in the OS.

EXPORTING PHOTOS FROM iPHOTO WITH DATE TAKEN:
Have you checked out my post called, “How to Get Your Photos Out of iPhoto With Your Titles and Descriptions Intact.” If so, definitely check this out. It has a video I put together explaining how to handle getting photos out of iPhoto with “dates taken” still in the metadata.

https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/how-get-photos-out-export-iphoto-titles-descriptions/

You didn’t say exactly where you were looking when you copied files from iPhoto to your external drives to see if the “date taken” was in the file or not. I suspect you were looking at the column in the Finder application window that says “Date Created.” This is very confusing for people, and understandably so. This Mac operating system (Finder in this case) doesn’t care when your photo’s were taken. Not at all really. The file system is just responsible for taking care of the files on the hard drive and in the example of the photo you copied out of iPhoto to your hard drive, that particular file was created TODAY… not the day the photo IN the file was taken with your camera. So, if you take photo with your camera last week, but you don’t import the photos into your computer until today, Finder is going to tell you the date the file was created is today. It doesn’t know when you took the photo. That’s the job of the EXIF metada. (The video in the post I mentioned above explains all of this)

EXIF/IPTC METADATA:
This is what you really want to care about, and this is what a lot of my website is going to focus on more in then future. This metadata is information that is stored inside of the actual file, that is accessible by any application that chooses to. A lot of photo applications don’t. It’s a shame. But they just don’t. They usually are just editing programs focused on letting you do visual changes to the photo, and have little to do with labeling, sorting and storing your images like iPhoto, Picasa and Lightroom etc.

In the video above, I showed you a program I use a lot called iExifer. This is a small, inexpensive photo “viewing” application that will show you a photo that you load up with it, and on the left it will display all of this EXIF/IPTC metadata. You can find this application by going here: https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/iexifer-app_store. Currently, it’s selling for $3.99.

EXIF metadata is information written into the photo file when the photo was taken — lens type, gps data, aperture, date it was taken (ding ding) etc. IPTC metadata are fields where you later can type in information about the photo such as who took it, description (caption), who owns the copyright, an actual city and state written out where the photo was taken etc.

So, I think, unless I am mistaken, you are getting MOST of all of this, you just might have been missing this last bit about Finder not showing you the EXIF data, and without using a program like iPhoto or iExifer, you won’t be able to see the time and date the photo was taken for those images you copied to your external drive. I hope some day, Apple will write into OSX, a way to show “Date Taken” from the EXIF information. That would be nice!

iPHOTO WORKFLOW WITH 2 DRIVES:
I am really reluctant to give you too much of an answer about how to handle your workflow with photos on your main drive, and your external one. It’s becoming a huge problem for ALL of us, now that we are getting new computers with small internal drives (usually small solid state drives now), and large external drives. I too don’t like having to have my photo libraries spread all over the place. It would be nice to have everything all in one place again. But, we don’t live in that world right now it seems. And this question is hard to answer, because for me sitting here, even though you’ve very nicely written out a lot of information for me here, it’s still kind of like a psychologist seeing a new patient for the first time and she tells her, “Doctor, what should I do. I caught my husband having dinner with another women! Should I get a divorce or not?” There are so many variables to your personal situation that I don’t know, it’s hard to give you a 1-size-fits all answer.

What I can say is that in general, unless you feel like you are an advanced computer user, I would advise you and anyone else -not- to do anything that makes your life more confusing. iPhoto does such a wonderful job of protecting your files and making it easy, that to have duplicates of your photos in several different places (different drives), just makes your life so much more difficult. It will make you want to just never open iPhoto because it will be stressful.

So, unless there is a strong reason why you want photos outside of an iPhoto library file, for less tech savvy people, I would advice you to either 1) keep your entire library file in 1 place with ALL your photos in them. If your main drive is small, then this either means upgrading your internal drive to a bigger one (or adding a second one for some people if there’s room inside), or it means putting them on an external drive and then just living with the minor inconvenience of having to make sure the external drive is connected and turned on when you want to use it. Or 2) break up your collection into 2 iPhoto library files. Move the collection you have now to an external drive, and then start over with a new library file on your main hard drive. When you launch iPhoto, it loads which library file you had opened last. To use the other one, go up to “File” and then click on “Switch to Library” and choose the other one from the list. (In this menu you can also choose to create a new one)

If you ever want to merge your 2 libraries, you can do this. Currently, it’s an advanced procedure and Apple doesn’t want iPhoto users to do it. But, using a third party program “iPhoto Library Manager” by FatC Software, or upgrading to Apple’s Aperture ($79), you can combine library files. Apple has made it now so that you can load your library file up in Aperture OR iPhoto. So upgrading to Aperture is simple! Once in Aperture, you can “import” 1 library into another and it will combine them. Very easy. So, don’t worry that having 2 libraries now will prevent you from having 1 giant one later.

MANAGED LIBRARY VS. REFERENCED:
There is an “advanced” option, which is easier to do in Aperture, but it allows you to store your photos outside of the library file and iPhoto and Aperture will “reference” them whenever it needs to see the image full screen, like when you do edits to them. Otherwise, it just uses the thumbnail file and small versions that it creates and stores inside your library file when you import them. This is how I have all of my scanned photos in Aperture. I have the masters stored outside of my library file on an external drive, but my library file on the internal drive. I can organize and label my photos without having the external drive connected, it’s just when I want to zoom in and do an edit to it do I have to connect and turn the drive on.

The problem for you is once you have imported images the “managed” way, you need to use Aperture to “un-manage” them and make them “referenced.” Watch this video for more about this this process in iPhoto: https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/iphoto-imported-photos-iphoto-library-managed-referenced/

Also, If you haven’t read this article, this might also help you out if you ever want to change the “date taken” with a photo: https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/iphoto-change-date-time-photo-taken-digital-camera-scanned-photo/

Thank you for the kind comments about my website. If you judge success on the amount of people that I have helped already in just a few short years, without any kind of advertising at all, then YES, my website has been very successful. I get a lot of wonderful compliments from a lot of warm people like yourself and it goes a long way. 🙂

I hope all of this helps Hayleigh!

Cheers!

Yvonne, thanks for the additional information. Yeah, all the pieces are coming together more.

So tell me if I am right here. When you are in iPhoto on your computer, you are able to view the date and time when the photo was taken. Correct? You’re probably on an older version of iPhoto than I can remember, but in the latest versions at least, in the (i) information panel on the right, you can view the EXIF metadata that the camera generates that shows you when the camera recorded the photo.

Now, if that is all true, then when you export out the photo to your external drive from iPhoto, you are creating a new “version” of the photo. It’s the same image, but it’s a completely new file — a duplicate if you will — that iPhoto made and saved to your external drive. So, if you are in the Finder application and are looking at that file sitting there on your external drive, all that application is able to tell you in those columns of information is when THAT file was made, and when THAT file was last modified. So, since you just created it with iPhoto, it’s not able to tell you when the image inside of the file was taken because that’s information that’s stored in another part of the “metadata” stored inside of the file.

In order to see that “shoot date” and “shoot time” metadata, you need to use another program other than Finder to see all that data. Such as iPhoto, or iExifer or something like that that has that capability built in.

I just googled “exif iptc metadata free viewer” and got a bunch of hits. But, it’s hard to narrow down a “safe” one for you to download that might work on your version of OSX. You’re right, you do have kind of a dinosaur mac. 😉

So tell me this, tell me exactly WHAT you are trying to do with the images on your external drive. Like, are you trying to just view a huge list of the files and see a column of the shoot dates? Or would you actually like to load them up in a viewer so you can click through the images etc.. like you do in iPhoto. This might help us figure out what kind of program you need to be looking for to view this metadata with.

Curtis

Hi Yvonne. That’s a tricky question without knowing everything you are doing and applications you are using on your computer.

If you copy a photo file, like a .JPG file, from your main hard drive to an external drive, the time and date the photo was taken will still be save inside of the photo in the EXIF metadata that your camera wrote as the photo was taken. Now, whether you can see this time and date is determined by what program you are using to look at the photo and this information.

If you loaded that photo up in iPhoto, from the external drive, you would be able to see this data. Likewise, if you use a program like iExifer (App store) you could also see this metadata. If however, you are just looking at the file stored on your hard drive in Apple’s Finder application, then you may not be seeing all of the information that Finder can show you because you are only looking at one column of information — probably the “Date Modified” column. If you grab the corner of the Finder window and stretch it out, can you see more columns of info? If not, go up to “View” at the top menu and select “Show View Options” (command-j) from the list. Then select “Date Created” from the list — add a check next to it. This will add another column of information that should give you the date the photo was taken IF that is the original file and not a version and it was created the same day the photo was taken.

The thing is most often, when the photo taken and when the actual FILE was created aren’t always the same thing. The Mac Finder just cares about when the file itself was created and modified, and that’s what it’s going to show you. So, if you are trying to use Finder to see the dates shots were taken and even with “Date Created” being checked if it’s still wrong, then you are going to need to use another program that displays EXIF camera metadata that will pull up that time and date stored INSIDE of the file that the camera wrote — like a photo manager like iPhoto or Aperture, or iExifer etc.

How’s that for a complicated answer. Simple questions usually have long answers huh? 🙂 This stuff can just get complicated fast because there are so many variables at play with photos.

Hope some of this helps!

Oh, also to mention, you probably saw it but I just wrote a post about how to change the photos shoot date in iPhoto. Check this out if you haven’t seen it, maybe there is some information in here that can help you to see the exif data in iPhoto:

https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/iphoto-change-date-time-photo-taken-digital-camera-scanned-photo/

Hi Amanda. Sorry to hear you are having problems with your library file.

In situations like this, where it seems you did nothing wrong, it’s probably just a minor “corruption” that the software can fix on its own. You just need to follow the instructions to repair and/or rebuild the library file.

Go the page above on Apple’s website and follow the instructions. Even though the chances of anything bad happening in this rebuilding process, I wouldn’t take the chance of doing it if you can, without creating a backup of your library file. Assuming you have the drive space on another drive, it’s as simple as copying-pasting your library file from your main drive to another one so it will put a duplicate somewhere else that you can easily access.

I would start with the “repair” option. If that doesn’t work, then go with the “rebuild” option. I’ve heard of great success from people trying either or both of these options.

Let me know how it goes Amanda. Hope this helps!

I should add…. just to complicate matters, I have loaded duplicates to both computers on several occasions, as a method for backing up. When I merge them, I’m sure that will cause some issues….

Hi Angela. Thank you for the compliments of my video! That’s very nice of you to say. 🙂

What you are asking sounds very reasonable, and in a perfect world, should have an easy answer. The problem is iPhoto is really for people with basic goals, and you are fairly limited to the amount of “advanced” tasks you can do. Breaking up libraries and merging them are 2 tasks Apple doesn’t feel you should be doing at the “iPhoto level.” If you also had Aperture (Apple’s pro photo app), you could split and merge libraries.

Your “cumbersome” idea of moving folders of images means you are suggesting going into the contents of the iPhoto Library file and moving the photos themselves — which really isn’t the best way of doing it. The problem is that 1) you’re not really supposed to go in there — right? I mean, they let you, kind of as an emergency, but it’s not the preferred method (and you really got to be careful to you don’t change anything in there or you could corrupt your library). 2) If you have done any edits (color correction, cropping etc) or written any captions to your photos etc in iPhoto … and these haven’t been saved already to the images (and many aren’t and are just saved in a database), then this data will not carry over with your photos to your new library. Should you also take the “modified” files which do have edits, now you have 2 sets of photos and it gets really confusing fast on the other end.

The alternative (and safer) way to manually copying folders from inside of the “contents folder” of the library, is to just do it from within iPhoto. You can File>Export out photos or folders of photos from within iPhoto and send them to another drive. This will of course give you another copy of each photo, so now again, you are dealing with duplicates. But, at least you have the option of your exports to include edits, titles and descriptions if you set your export settings properly.

Another less often thought of option would be to follow this video you just watched to “duplicate” your library, but don’t do the last step which is to delete the old copy. You will have 2 exact copies of your library. Now, carefully, delete the photos from the library “A” that you don’t want in that library (on that drive/computer), and then open up the library “B” on the other drive or in the other location/computer and then delete the photos you don’t want there. You want to delete them from WITHIN iPhoto … by moving them to the trash INSIDE of iPhoto. (And again, backups are VERY important here, because then you have a pristine copy of your original library to go back to if you find out later you deleted photo(s)/events from both copies of your library.)

And still, the easiest way, as I mentioned at the top, is to buy Aperture and use it’s capability to split (“export” parts of your library into a new library) and merge your “photo library” (create one library from 2 by importing one into another) that you created in iPhoto. It costs you $79, but it will save you a lot of headaches.

Hey Rebecca — you’re welcome for that speedy reply. So what probably happened was you were in the original photo library called “iPhoto Library” in your pictures folder to begin with. You moved your library file to your external drive and loaded it up (maybe — maybe not). Then you disconnected your external drive. When you launched iPhoto again, it looked around your computer, but it couldn’t find another library file. And since iPhoto can’t work without a library file, it created another one for you in the default location (pictures folder) with the default name (iPhoto Library).

So, you don’t need to create another iPhoto library now, because iPhoto apparently did it for you. So, now anything you import into iPhoto will go inside of this library file — the one in your pictures folder (because this is the last one you opened). If you go up to FILE > SWITCH TO LIBRARY you can choose to open your library file on your external drive (as long as it’s connected and turn on of course). Use the same process to switch back and forth, loading whichever library you would like. Again, just remember, iPhoto will initially load whichever library file you had opened last the next time you launch the application. Then just “switch to library” to change once you are in one.

So you can load up one library file and import some pictures, the switch to your other library file, and import another set of photos — or even the same pictures if you want. It could get really confusing and fast if you aren’t organized and know what photos you are putting where and for what reason. So just be careful. Should you ever want to merge your two libraries together — like if you get a large hard drive that can accommodate the size of both – you can upgrade to Aperture and it has a feature to import another library (merge libraries together).

Another tip, with iPhoto closed, you might really want to consider renaming your iphoto library files so it’s less confusing for you. Maybe go to your external HD and rename that one “iPhoto Library Old” and then in your pictures folder “iPhoto Library New.” (You can safely rename them like you would any other file — just do it with iPhoto closed) Rename them something easy but something that will mean something to you if you go to the File > Switch to Library… you will want to be able to easily tell which is which since currently they have the same name. (Newer versions if iPhoto will list the file path underneath in the switch to library window so you can tell which is which – but it’s still makes sense to rename them)

Hi Rebecca!

132 gigs! Wow that’s a healthy collection! That’s a lot of video I bet adding to a bunch of photos 😉

Really, your iPhoto won’t “accept” any more photos? It’s telling you it won’t accept more (??) or you are just out of space on your computer’s hard drive so you have to expand out somewhere?

I do a lot of copying of large video files all the time, so it’s not uncommon to see OSX/Finder telling you it might take 2 days to copy a folder of files to an external drive. Most often, this is a quick estimation based on an average of the time it has taken so far to copy a certain amount of files. But, as the time goes by, the time goes down as it realizes not all files are the same size.

Another reason it could be taking a long time is if you are copying using the older USB2 connection. USB2 is dreadfully slow to copy gigabytes worth of data. So, if you wanted to speed it up, you could stop the copying, and use a faster connection if your computer and external drive offers it. Firewire 800, eSATA, USB3 or Thunderbolt are all better choices and in that order (Thunderbolt being the fastest). Of this list, my 2010 Macbook Pro only offers Firewire 800. So, I am anxiously looking forward to the new Mac Pro that will introduce USB3 and Thunderbolt to my life! 🙂

If you need to keep copying with what you have, you can go into the Apple menu at the top (The icon in the top left corner that looks like an Apple) — click there and then click on System Preferences. In the Hardware row, click “Energy Saver” and then temporarily drag the slider to “Never” for “Computer Sleep” and deselect “put hard disks to sleep when possible” if it is checked. I am not saying for sure your computer will stop copying over night, but by doing these two things, you are almost guaranteed it will now not stop for energy saving reasons in the middle of the night.

Hope this helps!

Hey Ryan. That’s a nice healthy collection you have there!

It may sound like I am just repeating the error message you graciously provided me, but it sounds to me like your problem is that you are trying to launch a Time Machine “backup” of your iPhoto library which, if I am not mistaken, is not something OSX is very content in allowing.

One way to think of it is that it would be like trying to play with Legos in a box stored away on a shelf. First, you need to empty the box onto the floor and spread them out. Then you can build something!

So, if you want to load this particular backup of iPhoto library, you will need to enter into Time Machine, find and select this backup, and then click on “Restore” and put it somewhere on your external drive or another drive where OSX can “see” it. (iPhoto can’t “see” a library file that is stored away as a Time Machine backup)

If you would prefer not to go this route, and just keep your time machine backup of this library as a true backup (which is what most people do), you will need to follow the first half of my video that explains a way how to duplicate/copy your original library file (without using Time Machine). This method will allow you to load it without any problems.

Hope this helps 🙂

Hmmm. I don’t think I am familiar with that issue. So you followed the tutorial, duplicated your library to another drive (or at least another place) and you double checked to make sure your new library is complete and working fine. Right? Just making sure ;).

So now you are ready to delete the old one. You dropped the huge old library file in the trash can in your dock and then tried to empty the trash and it wouldn’t empty.

Is this all correct? What is the error message that it gave? That might be a clue for me.

Thank you Karen! Ha! And really funny too — your poor husband. 🙂

It’s hard for me sometimes to know how advanced or how simple to make a tutorial. I really geared this one pretty simple so that I was sure people would take extreme caution with what could be a really devastating mistake if they weren’t careful. And seems to have worked out for the best this way.

Thanks for letting me know of your all’s success.

I am so happy for you Sarah! I bet that was scary for you for a while there!! Technology is so amazing until it isn’t… It’s so great to hear you got your collection back! LOVE IT!

And thanks for letting me know I helped you out a bit — I really appreciate that. 🙂

Welcome back Kelly! Brand new Macbook Pro — jealous! Especially if you got the Retina model 😉 Either way .. enjoy that baby!

Believe it or not, it’s actually just as easy to put your library back as it was to move it in the first place. With iPhoto closed, all you have to do is drag that library file from your external drive back to your main hard drive and drop it where you would like to store it. (You can also copy and paste the library file back to your laptop hard drive if that’s easier for you) Apple prefers you keep it in the “Pictures” folder inside of your User folder. But, you can put it wherever you would like.

And once you drag or copy and paste, you will have two copies now. So, be sure to delete the one off your external drive if you don’t want two versions. But, as always, make sure your copy works before you delete and empty the trash! Be very careful. If I were you, maybe delete the external hard drive version, but don’t empty the trash for like a couple weeks while you are testing out the new copy on your laptop hard drive.

When you launch iPhoto for the first time, like in my video tutorial, you will need to hold down the “option” key as you click on iPhoto so that you can select your new copy of your iPhoto library on your laptop hard drive. Otherwise, it will want to keep loading the library from the previous location from when you launched it last — which would be from your external hard drive.

Good Luck — though I doubt you will need it. 😉

Wow. Impressive!

I had read about some people doing this method as well to weed out a corrupt file, but I didn’t even consider this as a first “option” for you because most people would have heard this suggestion and just laughed! That could really be a lot of work with a massive collection. So, glad to hear you took on the challenge and succeeded! Wahoo!

You’re welcome,
Curtis

Hey Kate. Sorry you are having problems copying your Library file.

I myself haven’t run across this error before. But, a little googling let me know others have had it as well. Some threads pointed to the possibility that it’s the destination drive that could have a bad sector, and when Finder is trying to copy part of your library over this sector, the drive isn’t allowing the data to be recorded.

Are you hearing any kind of “repeating” noise from the drive ever when it’s saving before you get this error? If so, maybe you have another drive you could try backing it up to, and see if you get the same error message. If not, then it might truly be a corrupted file somewhere in your library file.

Here’s an error I find often when searching:

The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “iPhoto Library” can’t be read or written.
(Error code -36)

Does this look like the error code you received?

The first steps to solves this, from the information I found, was to try and let iPhoto rebuild some of it’s file first before you try more drastic means. Hold down “Option” AND “Command” while loading up iPhoto. This will launch a panel and will ask you which functions you want to perform. Of course, the first thing Apple recommends is to backup your library before proceeding (sigh).

Do you have it backed up from Time Machine already to another drive just in case?? I hope, but I understand if you don’t.

Your options in this menu will be different depending on how old your iPhoto application is. But, if yours is version 9.3 and later, I would start at the top with “Repair Permissions” and work your way down. For example, if a thumbnail is corrupt, possibly “Rebuild Thumbnails” might replace this corrupt file with a working version.

Here is Apple’s support page on this if it makes you feel safer reading it:

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT2638

Hope this helps, if not, let me know and we can try something else.

I agree to you buddy. But on all above post author has replied quickly. Anyways I will wait and not spam the blog further 🙂

I can copy the inside iPhoto library data (15Gb) in 14mins of time. Then why not the iPhoto library. Please suggest solution

Hey Kunal. I like your name — very unusual. At least, I don’t think I’ve heard it before. 😉

This could be tricky, so let me answer you in complete sentences to make sure I understand your question completely.

If you drag or “copy” your iPhoto Library file (essentially it’s really a folder) to your external drive, now you have two identical copies of it. If you then delete the original one from your Mac hard drive, you now only have 1 copy of it. So hopefully you have checked to make sure your copy on the external drive copied okay and all looks okay inside before you delete your original — right?? 🙂 (just making sure — it scares me that some people might not do this and they will end up losing photos)

So your question is now that you only have 1 library file, will iPhoto create a new library file for you when you want to add new photos to iPhoto from here on out? Is this correct?

If so, the answer is that when you launch iPhoto from here on out, it will continue to load the library file that was loaded last. So, if the last library file that you loaded was the “original” library file, then it’s going to freak out a little bit and try and help you find that library file that’s now missing. But, all you would have to do in the menu that pops up is point it to the location of your new library file on your external drive. (If however, you hold down “option” when you load iPhoto, you will force it to give you the option which library file to load instead of just loading the “last loaded” one)

Once this library file is loaded once, and then you quit out of iPhoto, the next time you load iPhoto it will now load from your external drive — as long as it’s connected of course. If the drive isn’t connected, then it’s once again going to freak out a bit and try and help you locate it.

So as you add photos to iPhoto, it’s going to add photos to whatever iPhoto library is currently loaded. It won’t choose for you or create a new library for you. It will wait for you to make that choice and new photos will go into whichever library file you decide to load.

For example, you could take photos from your iPhone and add them to one library. Then load another iPhoto library and add photos to it and go back and forth.

Does this answer your question? 🙂

Hey Jess. Thanks for stopping by. I’ve read through your comment a couple times now, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a bit hard for me to diagnose your problem from the information you have given me. So let’s start here.

In my video, I show you how to go into the preferences of iPhoto to see if iPhoto is managing your library. If that box is checked, then all of your photos should be stored “inside” of this 1 library file (technically it’s a folder — but it looks like a file).

So if you goal here is to move your Library file from your desktop to an external drive, I would suggest you check the size of the original Library file, write down that file size, then copy the library to your external hard drive and then check the file size of this second and new library file to see how big it is. If the two library files are the same size, then you know it (probably) copied okay.

To find out how large the library is, click on the library file and then hit command-I (the letter “i”). A window will pop up and one of the lines will tell you the size.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the library is 20-80 gigabytes.

So once you know you have a new duplicate library file that is the same file size as the original, you can then hold down the option key while launching iPhoto and then select this new Library file and it should work.

Try all of this and let me know how it goes. And please, like you said you have done so far, please don’t delete ANY library file until you are SURE you have a working “duplicate” library file created on another drive.

Best,
Curtis

Sorry this is happening for you Sharon. 🙁 I hope you have a backup of your library file just in case something went wrong. Did you? Let’s see if we can figure this out:

My first question in a situation like this is, is your iPhoto set to “Copy items to the iPhoto Library” in the Advanced tab of Preferences?

Another question I am interested in knowing the answer to is,is the library file (copy) that is on your external drive the same file size as the original copy on your computer? (Hit Command-I on each file and it will tell you the size in the info window)

Awesome! Thanks Kelly. I’m so glad to hear I helped you out! 🙂

Tracie ~

Hey there! Thank you for the nice compliments to my tutorial.

I certainly don’t know if I am an expert at much of anything, but I am sure I could probably help you out with your problem here. 🙂 (I have my Apple Aperture library synced through Dropbox currently so that my parents can access the database and help me caption and order photos as I scan them) Though, I think I might need to know a little bit more information from you so I know how to proceed.

You say “They save to Dropbox by year and not by event.” What I need to know is, do you have your iPhoto library set to import photos and store them inside of the iPhoto library, or is your library set to store them in the same location that they were when you imported them into the library?

You can figure this out by going into the preferences of iPhoto, then the Advanced tap, and see if you have a checkmark next to “Importing — copy items to the iPhoto Library.”

If you have a checkmark next to this, then all of your photos should have a copy of them, copied into the library file. And the only way to see inside of this library file, is to open it up by option clicking on the file and clicking “show contents” and then going deep within the folder structure.

So I just need to understand how you have you library set up in the preferences, and what you are looking at exactly and where that shows they aren’t being organized correctly. Then we can go from there. 🙂

Curtis

P.S.:

Please feel free to respond as if you are addressing someone ignorant of technology. 🙂

That made me laugh. 🙂 No worries at all … whenever I try and explain anything to someone, it instantly reminds me how complicated this stuff always is!

Hey Crystal. Thanks for stopping by. Yes, let me try and help you out here.

1) I’m sorry you’re not happy with iPhoto. As much as I prefer the advanced features in Apple’s Aperture to the more basic iPhoto, I still think iPhoto is an excellent piece of software because it is easy to use and is “non-destructive” — meaning, it doesn’t change the original image when you make edits. In fact it protects it. So, I can only speculate here, because I don’t know what you have been through with iPhoto. But, I want to offer you the possibility that all of your photos could possibly be uncorrupted, but just have a bunch of “edits” or changes applied to them so it appears that they are “corrupted.” Again, I don’t know your situation for sure.

One way you could test this out is to choose an image that you think is messed up (corrupted) and choose “Export” from the list under the “File” pulldown menu at the top (shift-command-E). Then choose “Original” for “kind” in the “File Export” tab. The rest of the options except for “File Name” become greyed out. You can choose whatever for filename. I would select “Use Filename” if you want to preserve the original name your camera gave it. Then save it to say the desktop. Load this image up in Preview (double click on it) and it should load. See if the image is okay now — the way it looked before it became “corrupted.”

2) Good news on your main question. When you choose “Show Photo info” as you said in iPhoto, you are seeing the date the image was “Created” (taken in this case). When you outside of iPhoto, probably looking at the image on your desktop or in a Finder window in OS X, you are looking at columns of data as well. This data has a fancy title like EXIF and IPTC. All you need to know is that it’s all stored without you having to do much of anything, inside of the image file. The camera you shot the image with injected this data into the file. So now, you just need to know how to view it properly.

In iPhoto, you know you hit “show info” or “Info” down at the bottom. In a Finder window, you just have to make sure you show the correct column of information so you can see the right data. You are looking for the column that says “Date created.” When in a Finder window, click on “View” at the top and then select “Show View Options” (command-J). Then check off “Date Created.” You may have to drag and reorder the columns to get them to show in the order you want, but, the column should now show up.

Here’s a screen grab of an example Finder window I just set up:

Also check out the answer I gave to “Jay” on this post, right before yours. I explained the process of iPhoto exporting even more that could help you out.

Let me know if this works for you,
Best, Curtis

Thanks Jay. I’m glad you enjoyed it. 🙂

For reference, these answers are based on iPhoto ’11 v. 9.2.1
1) It sounds like you are using iPhoto in the default and easiest way — you’re letting iPhoto copy your photos into the iPhoto Library “folder.” You can check by going into Preferences>Advanced and there should be a check next to “Importing” Copy items to the iPhoto Library.

If this is the case, then iPhoto keeps all the folders inside the Library, and when you want to obtain a copy of one of the items inside, you rely on the “Export” feature inside of the “File” menu a the top.

So I would either individually click on files you want to get out of iPhoto and choose File>Export, or instead, make an Album in iPhoto with all of the photos. Then either export out by “Selecting All” (Command-A) or individually selecting them. Whichever you prefer. Making the album just gets them all in one place so you can possibly deal with them easier.

When you export them, choose your external hard drive and a folder where you would like to store them.

Whether “anything will get lost in the transfer” is tricky. It really depends on how you choose the export settings, and what if any of the information you typed into iPhoto you care about.

If you typed any descriptions (captions), keywords, or added a “place” (map data) to your photos you want to preserve, you need to export out with the highest quality setting that allows you to include this information. If you didn’t add any of this, I would export out with “Original” as the “Kind” and it will produce just the master image.

Your goal either way is to try your best to not “compress” the file any further.

With Additional Data (instructions):
Here’s for a JPEG
In the File Export tab of the export window, choose JPEG for kind, choose Maxiumum for JPEG quality, check “Title and Keywords” and “Location Information” for Include. For size choose “Full Size” and for filename use “Use filename” for camera given name or “use title” if you want to keep what you titled it in iPhoto — such as “Dad and I fishing.”

When doing this, the resolution dimensions will stay the same, but the file size may increase because the computer is changing the compression (to Maximum since we aren’t using “Original” settings) and then re-saving it. It could take up more room to insure you get the highest quality.

Without Additional Data (Instructions):
In the File Export tab of the Export window, for Kind make sure you choose “Original” (Master file). This will grey out JPEG Quality (if it is a jpeg) and Size options because it lets iPhoto know you want the “Original file” as is. And then if you choose “Use filename” as “File Name,” you will be sure to get the original name associated with the image from your point and shoot or DSLR camera etc (IMG3045.JPG), and not what you typed into iPhoto like “Me and My Dad Fishing.” Choose either name you wish.

2) Videos work the same way — almost. You choose “Original” to get the .mov (video version) for example. If you choose “JPG” in the pulldown, it will save out a photo frame grab of the video — which you don’t want. So just choose Original. It looks as if the IPTC data isn’t transferred across though. So if you added descriptions to video, that probably won’t transfer over.

To delete an image or video, just click on the image, or highlight several and choose Photos>Move to Trash (command-delete). Then empty iPhoto>Empty iPhoto trash and it will send it to the Mac OS trash can. Once you empty THAT trash can, then it will be deleted off your hard drive and that space will be recovered and will free up room.

Hope all this helps!
Best, Curtis

Thanks Paul! — I appreciate that. I’m glad I could help you out.

Hey Elayne ~

Three children under 5, I totally understand your not having much time and the need to prioritize with this! And someday, they will thank you (probably in their own ways) for all your work you are doing for them. 🙂 I look at all the thousands of photos my family’s collection is made up of and I am SO thankful my parents sacrificed their time and money to take them and care for them over the years. So thankful.

I read your comment a couple times just to make sure I felt you have a firm grasp of what you are about to do — and I think you do for the most part! Just a couple little things to add to avoid any possible confusion you may have as you do it. But yes, I think upgrading now and dealing with iPhoto later has the best rewards with your available time/energy etc. So you should go this route.

I will reply based on your numbering:

1. FYI: Depending on how old your computer is, you MAY not be able to upgrade all the way up to 10.7 Lion. Lion desires 4 gigs of ram or more and requires an Intel made processor. Some really old Macs aren’t made with Intels. But maybe you have looked into this at the Apple store already etc.

Either way, a fresh install and any kind of OS upgrade and any ram you can add should do wonders compared to what you have now.

2. Yup
3. Yup
4. Yes — import the “raw” untouched (unedited) originals. It should just be a matter of pointing to those folders on your external hard drive and as long as you have “Copy items to the iPhoto library” check marked in iPhoto > Preferences > Advanced (tab) then it will import them and organize them into events for you as it sees fit. All done for you. So make sure that’s checked.

5. Yes … but ….. TIMESAVER TIP: I don’t want to confuse you or make this more complicated for you on purpose. Sincerely. BUT, since you said your intent is to have your library file on your external hard drive all the time from here on out, IF you want to shave off a couple steps and this make sense to you, before you start to import your photos into iPhoto, and before you launch iPhoto, hold down the “option key” (that same trick) and when the window opens it will give you the option to create a “New Library.” Create the new library but have it create it ON your External Hard Drive. (You may have to select the little “triangle” button on the right to open up the option to select your external hard drive from the location list.)

iPhoto will open this library from your External drive. Then when you import your photos, they will all directly copy from the folders on your external hard drive to INSIDE of a this library ALREADY ON your external hard drive. This will keep you from having to do a lot of the steps in my video: move your library folder from your hard drive to your external hard drive and then delete it from the hard drive. Just a thought.

And by the way, every time you launch iPhoto the regular way, just by clicking on the launch icon, it will launch using the last library file used. So you won’t have to use the option key unless you are a) creating a new library or b) opening another previously un-opened library.

6. Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you need to give any details for metadata when importing camera photos. Your camera will actually record all the data that I meant – for you. Data such as: camera model, exposure, date taken etc.

7. Time Machine will come with a newer OS, so no downloading needed. It will be in “System Preferences” waiting for you. 🙂 The only thing with TM though is that I don’t believe you can have time machine back up anything on the same drive being used by time machine to back up to. So you would need a second external hard drive to run time machine with other than your drive holding your iPhoto library.

Defragging: Ahh. I remember those days on Windows. I have never run any kind of program like this on a Mac. Not because they don’t exist, but because in all of the Mac magazines and blogs I read all the time, I never read that Apple requires or even requests us to run them for “daily maintenance”. I personally just don’t want to go out of my way to find a third party program and have it mess with my system and hard drive and then run the chance of it causing a problem. If I ever had a big problem, even a speed one like you are having, I would back it up, wipe the drive – reformat it – reinstall the OS and then restore from the backup. And again, this is just me. But I feel safe in saying I don’t know any other Mac users that use these programs either.

Space Hogs: You should be fine using a program like DaisyDisk or WhatSize etc. These just analyze and probably won’t (from what I can tell from a quick glance) move things around (defrag) your hard drive. I haven’t used one of these before but at times I’ve thought about using one to make it easier to find bloated program “cache” files that are hard for me to find on my own.

Good luck — Let me know how it goes!
Curtis

Mikki ~ Aww — I’m so glad this helped you out! I just love hearing stories like this. It really makes me want to continue doing what I’m doing. Thanks so much for taking the time to let me know this. 🙂

Cheers!
Curtis

I think moron is a bit unfair to be calling yourself. IF I were to ever stretch that far, and accept a label like that with someone, I think it would have to be for someone that doesn’t care at all about their photos and does nothing to protect and cherish them. You obviously are not in this category. You just made a mistake — the hard way, like everyone does from time to time. And now you just need to spend the time and energy carefully going back and fixing it.

At least you have copies your photos (to the best of your knowledge). We could be having that conversation where I try and help you find a very expensive data recovery expert that can retrieve files from a hard drive that was erased completely! Now that’s got to be one sad day in someone’s life to have to deal with that!

And I am excited for you to get this upgrade underway! Going from 10.4 to 10.7 and having an iPhone working with your computer is going to be a huge and amazing step up for you!

I re-read your comments to me over again, and I think I’m starting to put the pieces together a bit more.

(1) To quickly answer your latest question — yes is the answer. If you have an iPhoto library and a bunch of folders of photos that aren’t in that library, then your idea to do FILE > IMPORT these photos will work just fine. Your worry about the “original date” when the photo was taken should no longer concern you because with digital cameras, this “date taken” information is actually stored inside of the actual image file (not in the iPhoto library databases) in what’s called “metadata.” I am assuming your photos we are discussing are digital photos correct? (I assume from reading the dates from the folders you listed – 2002-2005)

Now, if you are dealing with scans — that you made from prints or slides using a scanner, then this “date taken” is the date you actually made the scan. You can overwrite this “current” date, and replace the metadata information with the date you know the actual photo was taken, but it obviously requires manual work and know how.

One way to test this is to single click on a photo in one of your folders, then hit OPTION-I to bring up information about it. Forgive me, I don’t recall how OS 10.4 behaves exactly — but in later versions I know for sure you are given “Created” and “Modified” dates near the top. Under “More Info” you get camera data information about your camera and about the photo itself. This “created” date should be when the photo was taken with your digital camera that resides in the metadata inside of your image – .jpg file usually. And in at least the later versions of iPhoto, you can click the “I” info button and on the risde side of the window there is a panel that shows picture data. Your date taken should show up there.

(2) What I didn’t immediately get when I answered you last time was that your original iPhoto Library file was “damaged” — for lack of a better word. I need to know if this is correct.

What you seem to be telling me now is that after you copied the photos from inside of your iPhoto library on your main Mac hard drive TO an external hard drive. You then checked them to see if they worked on your external hd, and when they did, you then deleted the original folders of photos from your iPhoto library file on your main hard drive. So, if I am reading this correctly, and now I believe I am, the ONLY place your photos exist are on your external hard drive — outside of an iPhoto library file — in folders like 2004, 2005 etc.

Assuming this is the case, you have 3 options as I see it:

(A) FIX CURRENT LIBRARY: You COPY the folders back to your hard drive and inside of your library file where they were before — exactly. You DO NOT (of course) delete the photos from your external hard drive. Keep them there intact for at least a year from now — until you are so sure your new iPhoto library is working for many many months. Consider these folders your MASTER FILES now since they are all you have that you know are working. Then relaunch iPhoto and see if it’s back to normal. I have never done this and am not sure if this even works. But, in theory it should — I’ve never tried it.

Because you never created a new iPhoto library file by copying the whole library, there is no reason to think iPhoto needs to look for another library file. Your original library file will just continue to look in the same place as always.

GOOD: There’s a chance this will work, and any “organizing” work you did correcting the photos, labeling them the way you wanted with “event names” etc will stay intact.
BAD: It may not work if you don’t get it back exactly the way you had it. It may appear to have worked perfectly, but months from now, there is slight possibility you will find something went wrong you won’t know how to fix it. Like “!” on photos or events when it can’t find the images it is looking for.

(B) UPDATE AND START OVER: Now that you have zero photos on your main hard drive, (because they are all on your external drive now) you go ahead and do whatever it takes to upgrade to Snow Leopard (10.6) or Lion (10.7) and the latest version of iPhoto. Once your hard drive is updated completely — you’ve run all the system updates — THEN do your idea and IMPORT all of your photos from your external hard drive in their separate folders by year, inside of iPhoto ’11 (or whichever later version of iPhoto you install).

GOOD: You can start fresh with the latest version of everything and you know the library file is working 100%. You’re gonna upgrade to a new iPhoto anyway, so why not just start from there anyway.
BAD: You will lose all of the “organizing” data we talked about in the GOOD from (A) above — if you labeled event names and moved photos around to a certain order. All of that is stored in the library file and if you start over by importing your raw images into your a new library file, you will lose all of that info. (though like I said earlier — the camera information stays inside of the image files so you won’t lose that)

(C) CREATE NEW LIBRARY in CURRENT OS: You could create a whole new library file now, in your current OS and iPhoto 6. You would do this if you think/know your current library file is damaged beyond repair with step (A). All you have to do is hold down OPTION (don’t let up the option key until you see the window come up) while launching iPhoto and then choose create new library. Make sure you call it something that stands out — if nothing else call it “iPhoto Library New.”

GOOD: This will give you immediate satisfaction (peace of mind) that your iPhoto library is working with your photos before you upgrade your OS. You still will need to back this all up before you upgrade your OS – like I show you in the video tutorial.
BAD: You won’t have your “organizing” data like the BAD in (B). But, if you didn’t do much labeling and organizing and color correcting etc.. then you won’t have a huge loss.

Elayne, after re-reading your comments, I read that you said you tried this method before and it didn’t work. This could be because you held down the “command” key and not the “option” key. Or was this a typo in your comment and you actually did hold down option? This method will either let you create a new library file, OR let you open another one that you created. You can have as many library files as you want, you just can’t have more than one open at the same time.

NOTE: In (B) and (C) above, I wouldn’t mess around with importing the “modified” folders of photos. Those are the ones you did corrections to — cropping or color corrections. It will get messy if you have multiple versions of your photos. I would just import your original folder so you have the masters (originals) intact that you can re-correct. I hope this make sense.

TIME MACHINE: I just looked up in Wikipedia and Time Machine wasn’t added to OS X until 10.5 (Leopard). And since you have 10.4, you won’t be able to use it. But yes, it’s free and it’s a drop-dead simple way to back up your whole computer by just attaching an external drive. It runs every hour and saves a copy of what’s new and adds it to the external drive. Highly recommended as a backup method.

SOOOOO WHAT NOW: This is getting LONG isn’t it!? Haha. Sorry. I feel for you in this scary time and I wanted to give you all your options that I can think of that I think you can handle. The good thing is, as long as you don’t delete your only copies of your photos off your external drive, you can actually do/try all or any of three of my options above – A, B, and C.

You just need to read what I said here — maybe a few times for it all to sink in — and really think about what you feel comfortable doing and how much time you want to dedicate to this “project.” And again, these three options are all assuming you moved your images from your iPhoto library on your main HD to the trash and then emptied it. If they are still there, then your options are different.

So think this over, and let me know.

My best, Curtis

Hey Elayne — I’m sorry you are having all of these problems. I know it’s scary when you are dealing with irreplaceable photos.

So let’s start at the beginning. Your goal, from what I read from you, is you want to get your important stuff (like your iPhoto Library) off your hard drive, so you can wipe it clean and upgrade your operating system.

10.4 — wow. That’s pretty old. 🙂 With current OS X versions, you can do an OS update without moving everything off the drive. You are just doing an upgrade and OS X protects your files and just adds all the new system files to the drive. BUT, saying this, it’s still always best to have a backup of your iPhoto library at all times. You never know when something’s going to happen to your drive — or your computer as a whole (theft, fire etc).

Now, you’re going from what? 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.7 (Lion)? If that is the case, then maybe you will be doing what’s called a clean install — which is where you erase the drive and do a whole new install as opposed to an upgrade where it just overwrites the OS.

I wouldn’t recommend anyone really to tamper with the files inside of your iPhoto library. If anyone else is reading this, what Elayne did was basically right clicking (option clicking) on the library file and then choosing “Show Package Contents.” Inside, you will find all of the work iPhoto does behind the scenes to file and protect all of your photos.

Elayne, I’m not insinuating you did anything wrong to any of your photos with all of your intricate moving and renaming of content folders. But, when it comes to messing around with the innards of the library file, I think it’s safest to not touch it at all. I would hate for you to have a time months or a year etc. from now where something goes wrong and it’s because of something you did just recently inside of the library that didn’t “reveal itself” until much later.

So from here, I would suggest you play it the safest way and RE-COPY your entire library file from scratch again from your (original/main) hard drive to your (new) external drive — completely intact — all 68 gigs of it. Follow the directions in my video.

You can keep your work (what you copied before) you did before if it makes you feel safer. But, you want to make sure you make a complete new intact copy of the entire library file on your external drive — one that you haven’t gone in and done anything with inside.

I looked it up to see if holding down the “option” key was how you could change to another library in “iPhoto 6” and it does seem to be the correct way (as is is with subsequent versions). So IF you wanted to load this copy of iPhoto on your external drive, then you would hold down the option key and then click on the iPhoto icon in your dock. Then after it loads, it will ask you to click on “choose library” to select your external hard drive and the copy of your library file you just made.

Otherwise, you should then have 2 pristine copies of your library file, one on your main drive, and one on your external drive — both 68 gigs. Select each library file and then hit command-I and a window will pop up and in this window you can see how large the file is. Compare both libraries to make sure they are both the same size. If they are both 68 gigs as you said, then you know you (most likely) have 2 exact copies.

Now you can upgrade to your new OS.

Another way you can play this safe is to run your new external hard drive with Time Machine if you have enough room on there. This will back up everything important on your computer before upgrading to a new OS. I always run Time Machine on my computer at LEAST as a secondary backup to whatever other backups I do.

Let me know if this all make sense. I will be here for follow-up help if you need it.

Best ~ Curtis

Great! Glad to hear you figured it out. 🙂

Did you find an article somewhere you could point me to that does in fact state your drive can’t be formatted FAT-32 (PC) to copy over captions to? I don’t think I ever found such info when I looked. Curious.

Hey Gerald ~

I’m glad you liked my tutorial. 🙂

I must say, that’s a bit strange that you moved your library and the captions didn’t accompany your images. The caption information is either stored inside of your photos (metadata is being re-written by iPhoto) or it’s saved in a database file that is *inside* of the iPhoto library file. Either way, the caption information shouldn’t be missing.

One thing that you might check is whether the library file is the same size when you compare the original to the new copy. (Hit command-I on each to get file size) Though, that almost seems to be a stretch to assume it’s possible it didn’t copy the entire library.

At this point, I am questioning if there is any variable missing from the equation. Did you follow the tutorial exactly? Or did you change anything in the steps? Let me know. If you’re sure you didn’t, then I will do a couple tests on my end and see if I can reproduce your issue.

Thanks Jo ~ I appreciate the comment. Glad you liked it!

Hey Alun. Thanks for the challenge! Though, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to solve it with just the information you gave me but I will give it a try.

Sounds like when you are trying to copy your iPhoto Library file from your “old” HD to your “new” HD, it’s telling you that there is already a file there that looks just like the same file you are trying to copy. Does that sound right? And I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean exactly by it not recognizing upper and lower case keys. Are you trying to rename the iPhoto Library file and it won’t let you type in a new name with upper and lower case letters?

Moving the iPhoto Library file is just like moving any other file on your Mac — it just happens to be more important to us than most others! So, if you are dragging (for example) your Library file to another drive and it’s telling you the destination contains something with the same name, then chances are there is already a file there with that same name. Is it possible you started iPhoto and told iPhoto to create a library on that drive? Maybe there’s a new library on that new drive that is basically empty. Is that possible?

I just drug my iPhone library file (as a test) from my second (storage) HD on my computer to my solid state (main) drive on my computer — to the desktop‚ and it copied just fine because there wasn’t a file with the same name on my desktop. When I tried to copy the same file again to the same desktop, I got the message “A newer item named ‘iPhoto Library’ already exists in this location. Do you want to replace it with the older one you’re moving?” [STOP] [REPLACE]”

Is this a similar message to what you received? If not, let me know exactly what it says and any other information you can provide me to help you through this.

Best, Curtis

Alun ~ I’m posting what you last emailed me in here so someone who later finds this thread can read as well:

“Hi Curtis and thanks for the prompt reply. well i thought i had it figured out. this time it copied upto 15gb of pics to other HD before it gave me this …… You can’t copy “Lacie Pics ” because it has the same name as another item on the destination volume, and that volume doesn’t distinguish between upper- and lowercase letters in filenames.

Alun”

So from what you just told me, it sounds like the problem you are having is the way in which your Operating System is handling the issue of the way 1 or more files is labeled across the hard drives you are trying to copy them to and from.

If you have your “old” hard drive partitioned as a “Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)” drive, then you were ALLOWED to save one file as “Picture1.jpg” and another file as “PICTURE1.jpg” and have them BOTH in the same folder.

Now, if you tried to copy a folder (or in this case your iPhoto Library file) with these two pictures in it to a hard drive that was formatted as JUST a “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” partition, then you wouldn’t be allowed to have those two files co-exist in the same folder together because their filenames match. They match because they AREN’T case sensitive.

So, if it is at all possible, I would suggest you try one of the two things:

(1) Make sure all your files, photos, movies etc in iPhoto have unique “Master” filenames. No “Pic1.jpg” and “PIC1.jpg” type examples — make the names unique without relying on upper and lower case to make them appear unique.

(2) Take your new hard drive, load up Disk Utility in your Applications>Utilities folder and reformat it using the “Mac OS Extended (Case-sensistive-Journaled)” partition method.

Way (1) above is probably not the easiest and fastest way unless you know for sure which files may be labeled this way and you can rename them easily. But, in the long run it might be the best way since, I believe, most drives are formatted in the (Journaled) method and not (Case-sensitive). So it would give you a more consistent workflow amongst other computers and hard drives in the future.

Option (2) would be the fastest and easiest — as long as you don’t already have a bunch of stuff on there already that you would have to move off before you re-formatted it. (Since obviously it will delete everything on that drive as you re-format/partition it).

Hope this all made sense and works out for you. Let me and others here in the comments know how it worked out for you!

Best, Curtis

That’s a good question Stanley — because I didn’t elaborate at all what I meant by doing an initial backup in my video.

The real concern everyone should have with an irreplaceable photo collection is to have just 1 copy of it in just 1 location. So if your iPhoto library that is in your pictures folder in your home folder is the only place it exists, and should your drive ever fail or your database ever become corrupt (you never know what could happen someday) then you need to have a backup in another location to go to.

For most mac users, just using an external hard drive (or a wireless Apple Time Capsule) and running Apple’s “Time Machine” application will be the best (because it’s the easiest way) to constantly have a backup of all of your data (including your iPhoto Library).

Also there are paid backup services like Carbonite and Mozy you could use for offsite cloud “backup” storage.

An additional way is just following my instructions to move your iPhoto Library file in this video, but move it to yet another hard drive that you use (hopefully exclusively) for backups. Drag and drop your iPhoto Library file to this hard drive and then tuck this drive away someplace safe — maybe even at a family members house to protect it from possible theft or fire damage.

As you drag and drop, a (+) symbol will come up on your cursor showing you that the new Library File created will be a copy of the original in this new location and not just the new location for your old file.

I hope this helps. If I didn’t specifically cover what you meant, let me know and give me another chance. 🙂

Yay Tifffany! That comment made my day!

I just made a post on my SYEL Facebook page yesterday saying how excited I was that this tutorial has just crossed the 2000 view mark. But, it’s still so hard to know how helpful it’s really been for people. So reading this really makes me feel like all the work it took to make it was worth it.

So thank you for taking to the time to leave me those kind words. 🙂

Oh that’s great Sirinat – I’m so glad I was able to help you out! And I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know. Means a lot.

Let me know if you have any specific topics you would like me to focus on for my upcoming tutorials. 🙂

Thanks Erik! Glad you liked it. And more IS to come.

Helpful video thanks! I am just using an external for backup of photos. I have just backed up my original photo library, but when I take more photos and backup agsin will it copy all the photos again or just add the new ones?