i wanted to know if there is a way to use iphoto and to have most of my photos on an external hard drive and only a few on my laptop but still use the iphoto for both.
and if not -is there a way to use iphoto only with photos that are stored on my external hard drive?
thanks
– Erez
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There’s no good way to have some of your photos in a library in one location, and some in another.
I’d go with the external drive option (That’s what I do).
Just locate your iPhoto library and copy it — the whole thing as one folder — to the external drive.
Then start up iPhoto with the option key held down and select the new location as the library. Now you can get rid of the old iPhoto library.
One piece of advice: with your iPhoto library on an external drive it can be easy to forget to back it up with Time Machine or whatever solution you use. Don’t forget to make sure it gets backed up. Photos are often the most valuable pieces of data we have on our Macs.
thanks that was very helpful
How do you back it up with TM if it is on a external drive?
Time Machine will back up an external drive if it is attached to your Mac. You can specifically exclude external drives in the Time Machine options, but an external should be included by default. Check to see if that is already happening for you. Just open the external drive as a Finder window and then run Time machine. You should see all of the backups through time of the files on that drive.