Spreading Out Your Mac to an External Hard Drive

Lately my Hard Drive has been getting kind of full. This has made things run a little slower than I’d like (especially PhotoShop), but it also limited my ability to import more CD’s from my wife’s collection into iTunes or import as many pictures as we’ve been taking of the new baby. So I decided to move my iTunes and iPhoto libraries to my external Hard Drive.

iTunes was fairly easy. You change the iTunes Music Folder location under the Advanced tab in preferences. Click consolidate library under the Advanced menu and everything copies over. (Keep in mind, this copies, not moves, and you’ll need to delete the old copy if conserving space is your goal.)

iPhoto turned out to be even easier, but I was thinking that Apple products would behave roughly the same, but couldn’t find anywhere in the preferences that indicated location. But all you actually need to do is move your folder with iPhoto closed, then reopen iPhoto. iPhoto will ask you where your folder is. Point to the new one and your set.