My iPhoto and iTunes are really dragging down my already-not-lightning-fast MacMini G4. Is there a way to put these apps, or at least their libraries, on an external drive and still be able to access/work with them?
I did it for a windows box and it worked out just fine. I used the steps described here.
Yes, you can-- for Itunes, for example, you will (I believe) need to make a “symbolic link” to point to the folder on the hard drive. Sort of like an alias. Then you’ll go into your itunes prefs, advanced, and tell the program where to look for the music. If you do a google search on symbolic link someone will give you the correct syntax to use in terminal (something ‘ln -s’ etc but I’m not hot with Darwin and always have to look it up myself).
You don’t have to bother with a symlink. iTunes has an option in the preferenes screen somewhere to set the location of your library. Just copy all the music to the other drive, update the prefs, and delete the old library.
Just make sure that you keep a careful watch on things as you do this because iTunes starts fighting back in a passive-aggressive manner when you try to do things that don’t exactly fit the golden Mac way.
I have my iTunes library on my local hard drive, but the mp3 files reside on a NAS device. I told iTunes to not copy songs to library when they are imported.
The biggest problem I have had is that Macs are a bit flaky with network drives, so if you forget to mount the drive that has the songs on it, iTunes starts choking and saying it can’t sync a playlist on your Shuffle or iPhone.
Regardless, I like it this way, especially since I have all of my music on a read-only NAS drive, safe from harm and accessible to all in our house.
Huh. Ok, I’d thought I remembered having trouble getting Itunes to find it that way without the symlink, but perhaps I’m conflating that with some drama experienced getting an old Xbox to find the music via SMB. I am enlightened!
FWIW, it worked perfectly for me when I moved my iTunes library from the main HD to a second one I installed. (An external device should be no different.) The location setting is under the “Advanced” tab of the Prefs screen (but my iTunes is a bit out of date, it may have changed.)
This is going to be my weekend project!
The golden Mac way to do this would be to put all your music on one computer and use iTunes “Shared Playlists” to let others access it.
Unless you’re running very low on disk space, moving the libraries to an external drive won’t make your computer run any faster.
I’m running very low on disc space. I’ve already come to terms with how fast my G4 isn’t. 
For iTunes at least, there’s two ways to do this:
-
Move your itunes folder to another drive, and then point itunes to this folder in it’s preferences. I don’t suggest this method, because if you have itunes open and the drive isn’t online for whatever reason, you can get exclamation points next to all your songs indicating itunes doesn’t know where they are, and even when the drive goes back online, all of those exclamation points may not disappear. It can also make corruption of the itunes library more likely. Also, I’m not sure iphoto even has this option.
-
Move your itunes folder to another drive. Make an alias. Delete the folder on your old drive, and replace it with the alias. Rename the alias to the same name as your original itunes folder. Now itunes will think the folder is in the place it likes it to be, but the actual files will still be on the external harddrive. This works for iphoto too and leads to less problems if the harddrive isn’t on line. I would still suggest backing up your itunes library file weekly though, or at least about as often as you add new stuff to it.
I store my media on a external hard drive and I use the ‘allow iTunes to manage’ and ‘copy to library’ options. The iTunes library location is defined as the external hard drive within iTunes preferences.
I have also run into the problem where iTunes gets all upset when it launches without the external drive being mounted. When this happens iTunes resets the music library location preference back to the local hard drive. Of course this sucks because the library splits and new media gets moved onto the local drive until I figure out this happened.
To solve this, I made an alias of the iTunes application on the external drive. Then I replaced the iTunes app in the dock with this alias. This way iTunes cannot launch without the media drive being mounted.
OP, if you’ve got enough media to have to move it to an external drive, you should be considering buying two drives this weekend and using one for backup.
Hijack, does anyone know if I’d get better performance from iTunes by moving the app itself to the external drive? I occasionally get a few second lag when first selecting a song or a show to play, I’ve wondered if the lag is it trying to load the library across the usb connection.