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Storing a library on an external drive


You can store an iPhoto library on an external or removable hard drive just the same as you can on your computer's built-in hard drive. To create a new library, follow the normal procedure for creating a new library, and choose the external drive as the location for the library. If you have an existing library that you would like to store on your external drive, use the "Duplicate Library" command in the File menu. You will be given a choice of where to duplicate the library to, at which point you can choose the external hard drive that you'd like to copy the library to. Once you've created or copied your library on the external drive, you can then open it up just like any other iPhoto library.


You can also store an iPhoto library on some network accessed storage (NAS) drives, but doing so has several drawbacks. The first is that accessing an iPhoto library over a network connection is generally slower than one accessed on a hard drive attached directly to your computer. The exact speed can vary a lot, depending on your network setup, but you can expect things to be at least a bit slower when using this kind of setup.


Additionally, iPhoto does not fully support all NAS devices. Unfortunately, Apple does not document anywhere what types of disk formats and protocols are or are not supported by iPhoto, so there is no way to tell if any particular device will work short of just trying it. In iPhoto 9 and later, iPhoto will actually refuse to open libraries located on certain devices. No such explicit refusal is present in earlier versions of iPhoto, but you can still run into various problems with certain devices. Some examples include disk formats that are case sensitive or don't support using certain punctuation characters in filenames. So, if you really want to store your library on a NAS, it's recommended you do so carefully, and always keep a backup copy of the library in case anything goes wrong with your copy on the NAS.