How To Safely Move Your iPhoto Library to Another Hard Drive (Video Tutorial)
Sometimes your scanned or digital camera’s photo collection is just so massive it takes over your entire hard drive. Maybe even to the point where now it’s completely full!
If you don’t want to replace your current hard drive with a larger one, moving your photo collection to an emptier secondary hard drive is always another option.
A Real World Example
The other day, I overheard two friends of mine discussing how one of them wanted to move her iPhoto collection off her packed Macbook Pro laptop. They were looking for the solution in the most obvious place, the iPhoto “Preferences” menu option. But they couldn’t seem to find an option to point her collection’s storage location to her external hard drive.
It took me a moment, but thankfully I was able to remember on the spot this seldom needed secret trick. (There was a little pressure on me)
Because Apple wanted to make iPhoto so easy for someone to use, it only makes sense they also want to protect their users from doing anything that would accidentally ruin their collection. And one quick way to do that would be for you to make iPhoto lose the connection with the correct library and database and not know how to fix it.
Thankfully Apple lets us change which photo library loads and where we store it, they just didn’t go out of their way to make sure we would know how to do it!
My Very First Video Tutorial
So it occurred to me this is a situation a lot of iPhoto users will probably face at one time or another and would therefore be a perfect topic for my very first video tutorial on this website.
Oh, by the way, this technique will also work if you just want to move your library to a new folder location on your current drive.
Now go easy on me here! I haven’t recorded my voice (on purpose) in a long time. And it certainly wasn’t as easy as I had hoped! (I’m man enough to admit serious editing was involved)
For anyone who is unable to watch or listen, I have provided [CC] captions in the video as well as a full-text transcript below.
Additionally, if you have an extra moment, I would love to hear what you thought of my first video tutorial down in the comments below. You can give me the bad as well as the good, of course!
Thank you so much!