Lately, I’ve had quite a few discussions with clients about the shrinking empty space on their hard drive. Before they know it, they’re getting the “Your hard disk is full” message.

This isn’t too surprising because, if you are like me, you take bazillions of photos and rarely delete any. And as digital cameras are capable of higher and higher resolution, their file sizes are getting larger. (Let’s not even talk about all those songs in iTunes!) Your main hard drive contains the system files for Mac OS X and all the files for all the users. Eventually, even with the best of housekeeping, you will run out of space. At that point it makes sense to invest in an external hard drive, and do a little shuffling around of files to make room on the main drive.

Just about any external drive will work. The most common type has a USB 2.0 connection. Others have Firewire connections. For all around versatility, get one with dual connectivity — both USB 2 and Firewire. You’ll also find that they come in an ever increasing range of capacities — from small 160GB models to 1TB monsters. There are lots of choices. Get the biggest one you can find at the cheapest price! Personally, I have several of the MyBook series of drives by Western Digital.

Once you have your new external hard drive, you can make the move to transfer your entire iPhoto library to it. This will free up a sizeable amount of space on your main hard drive so you can, well… fill it back up again with something else.

Moving your iPhoto library isn’t very difficult, but there is always the risk of making a mistake and losing data. Losing precious photos isn’t a good thing, so BACK UP FIRST. (You DO have a backup plan, right???)

What we are going to do is actually COPY the iPhoto library from the main hard drive to the external drive. This is safer than just moving because if something happens during the copy we still have the original library. Once you are sure that everything copied properly, then you can delete the iPhoto library from the main hard drive.

Here are the steps to move your iPhoto library to your external drive:

1. Quit iPhoto if it is running.
2. Make sure your external drive is connected and turned on. In the Finder, the external drive will show as an icon in the left pane of a finder window. (Press Command-N to open a new Finder window.)
3. Open two Finder windows and position them one above the other.
4. In the top Finder window, start at your Home folder (the one with the icon of the house and your user name by it) and select the Pictures folder. Inside the Pictures folder you should see a folder called iPhoto Library. Depending on what version of Mac OS you are using, you may see an icon instead of a folder.
5. In the bottom Finder window, select your external drive. That is where we are copying the iPhoto Library to.
6. Select the iPhoto Library folder (or icon) from the top Finder window. Drag it to the bottom Finder window. This will start a copy process. How long the copy takes depends on how large your iPhoto library is. It’ll probably take a few minutes at least.

That’s all there is to it! Now we need to tell iPhoto that you have moved the library and where it is.

1. Hold down the Option key on the keyboard while you open iPhoto. You will see a dialog box like the one below.

   

2. Click the Choose Library… button. You will get a standard Open dialog window.
3. Click on your external hard drive icon in the left pane. You should then see the iPhoto Library folder that you copied earlier.
4. Select the iPhoto Library folder and click the Open button. iPhoto will open and you should see your photos.

Make sure there aren’t any problems with your new setup before you trash the original iPhoto Library in your Home > Pictures folder. Don’t forget that you now have important files on your external drive. Be sure to incorporate that drive into your backup plan. You DO have one, right?