Apple iPhoto is one of the iLife applications that ships with Mac OS X to facilitate importing, organising, editing and sharing digital photos. I use Adobe Photoshop for my digital photo work but the integration of iPhoto with Apple Front Row was enough to make me want to look at iPhoto a bit more closely.
By default, iPhoto copies digital photos to a new location in order to work on them, leaving the originals intact (sounds like a good idea to me) but because Mac upgrades are horrendously expensive, my Mac Mini only has an 80GB hard disk (and I take a lot of photos) and I keep my data on a 320GB external hard disk. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere in the application preferences to set the library location but I did find a way around this. By deleting the existing iPhoto library and launching the application, I was prompted to create a new library:
Then, selecting a location on my external hard disk allowed me to set up a new library exactly where I wanted it.
Actually, holding Option when launching from Dock will allow you to set or choose any library location you want, and select from multiple libraries at once.
Anonymous – nice tip – thanks.
Mark
Mark,
I had been suffering so. My back up hd collapsed (I hadn’t formatted it for a Mac du-uh) and lost a LOT of ipod stuff I thought was also elsewhere.
Then I installed Keyword Assistant (I’m using Tiger 10.4.9) and it made all my iPhoto library disappear.
I finally found the right combination of words to use with Google (you need to first say Abracadabra and spin to the left three times :)) and found your blog.
Thank you. I had re-installed my iphoto library on another drive but could not find out how to re-point iPhoto.
So tuvm, keep up the great work.
Hi Beth,
Having had my own deleted backup and lost photos trauma recently I know exactly how you feel – glad I could help.
Mark
To change the default file store location, go to terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.iPhoto RootDirectory /path/to/desired/location
To remove the change default:
defaults remove com.apple.iPhoto RootDirectory
Nice! Why isn’t this process explained by apple…its so simple. Thanks!