Working with photos and music from an external hard drive

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Hello

I wondered if someone can offer any help, struggling to find the answer elsewhere.

I use a two year old iMac G5 running OS X 10.4.11 at home. I'm currently using 85Gb of my 149Gb (mostly photos, music and design work) on my mac and I've really noticed my machine has slowed down.

I decided to buy a Freecom 160Gb external hardrive and put everything on it to free space on my hard drive, and have all my stuff with me at home or work.

My question is, is it possible to easily access photos and music from the hard drive though iPhoto and iTunes without having to go through a time consuming loading process every time?

If this is possible and there is a 'best way' to do this, it would be great if someone could let me know.

Cheers,

Marc
 
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Copy your music and pictures folders from your home folder to the new drive. Hold the Option key when starting itunes and iphoto. Browse to the new location for your files. Your done.
 
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Mac Mini Core i7 2012 | White 2009 MacBook 2 Ghz | 733 Mhz G4 Quicksilver
The option bit in iTunes will allow you to select the itunes libaby file, not the location of all your music

Keeping your iTunes collection on an external

The following assumes you want to keep all your iTunes music and movies on an external disk and ensure new music is always stored on the external drive.

First, you need to consolidate your iTunes Library to a folder you have chosen of the external drive.

Select the command consolidate library from the Advanced Menu. This will copy all your itunes media to the external folder and link the itunes library file to it

The files will now be on the external while the library.xml file (the index as it were) will still be in the Users > Me > Music folder of your mac.

If you want this file on the external as well as well, copy it to external iTunes folder, start itunes with the alt key pressed and you will have the option to select the library file now on the external



Select the library file you just copied and now both your music and the library are on the external

You can now delete the old Itunes folder off your mac

You can also use the choose library dialogue to switch between a large music collection on the external and a smaller music folder on the mac if you wish
 

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