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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Tranferring pictures from Iphoto to external hard disk

denn23 - Apr 25, 2006 - 4:34 am

hi.

I would like to transfer all my photos from iphotos into my external hArddisk. How do I do it?

If my photos are all in the harddisk, CAn i still use iphoto to organise/view pictures?

I dont want to have duplicated photos (one in my external harddisk and one in iphoto).

Hope u understand wat im trying to do..

thanks
Dennis
Pather os

philippe99 - Apr 25, 2006 - 6:54 am

Hi and welcome to macosx.com

Yes of course, you can. Well, you external drive must be mounted.

(1) Move (so move, not copy) your Iphoto Library (the whole folder you have in your Images folder on your internal drive) to a new location, i.e somewhere on your external drive
(2) relauch iPhoto. When you do, because you do no longer have an iPhotLibrary folder on your internal harddrive, up pops a dialog box that reads something like (sorry my OS is French):

"Your Photo Library was not found. Do you want to find your Photo Library?"

accompanied by three buttons: "Quit", "Create Library", and "Find Library".

To complete the connection, just click Find Library and navigate to the new location of the iPhoto Library folder.

Regards
Philippe

denn23 - Apr 25, 2006 - 3:14 pm

THanks for the response..

But what im trying to do is do organise the photos in a way so that it can be viewed properly when I use my Windows. (i.e. 2006> January> John's birthday)

Hope u know wat i mean.

thanks

philippe99 - Apr 26, 2006 - 1:44 am

Ah ok.
No. iPhoto way of organizing photos is done in such .. oh my god ... pity way that only iPhoto understand the structure.

I do not know if there is a way to export blocks of photos out from iPhoto: yes, one by one, but a lot of them in a glance, I do not know ???

I you prefer to handle yourself your photos structure, it is better to store them in your structure and use dedicated browser (like iViewMedia our GraphicConverter).

Iphoto is for people who want to store/use photos without asking where/how/why they are stored there.

Despite what you can think, I strongly believe that iPhoto is more a toy than a tool.
I use iPhoto. Yes, really. I think it is easy to show photos of birthdays, holidays... but every important photos are first copied to my external drive (following my way of organizing the directory) before importing to iPhoto

iPhoto is for the "show". My important photos are carefully backuped in a secure place

Philippe

denn23 - Apr 26, 2006 - 4:21 am

hey philippe..

thanks for your help. =)


But the problem is cause im regularly shuffling between my MAC osx and my windows.. so I need to consolidate all my photos from both computers into my external disk.

Im hoping someone has a solution.

thanks

philippe99 - Apr 26, 2006 - 1:24 pm

Your external drive is Windows formatted ?
If yes, no problem: jpeg files can be viewed by both OS and the directory structure you'll build by your own will be also viewed by the two OS (just avoid blank or special characters like @ & ... in names of files and directories.

If you hard drive is mac formatted, Windows will not see it (well, you can buy additional software on Win to to force Win to understand mac format of drives..)

Philippe

An example: I have an USB flash key, with two directories (Data and Photos); I put data (word files, ..) in the Data directory and photos in the Photos one; I put or read these data either on my home Mac or my Win machine at my work office without any problem.
If on Win, I have a photo like "Photo of grandma at beach.jpg"...you see with blank in the name... I start renaming it as "Photo-of-grandma-at-beach.jpg" before transferring on the key.
And a key flash drive is nothing more than a small external drive No ?

Philippe

denn23 - May 1, 2006 - 4:50 am

yeap.. its windows formatted.. so that should be no problem.

but how do i transfer all my pics into my external hard disk?

cause if u just move my iphoto library, it would be soooo messy to view in windows.

thanks

philippe99 - May 1, 2006 - 9:07 am

What you can do.
in Iphoto, open the whole libray or a roller or folder you have created to store photos, then select the photos you want to export.
Select Share > Export from the toolbar menu; choose the export format and click on Export; browse to the final folder in which you want to stor the photos