Move Your iTunes Library in Six Simple Steps

We often have customers come into our store who have such large music or photo libraries that they are running out of space on their Mac’s internal hard drive. Luckily, with just a few quick steps, you can move your iTunes or iPhoto library to an external drive, with all the necessary files it needs to retain its neat and organized structure.

You will need three things to complete this task: an external hard drive with a good amount of free space, your Mac and some time to let the files copy over. For this example, we will move an iTunes library from a Mac to the external drive; the same basic procedure can be used to move an iPhoto Library as well.

1. Connect your external hard drive to your computer.
2. Use Finder to locate your Music folder on your Mac, and open it to find your iTunes folder.
3. Drag your entire iTunes folder onto your external hard drive, which should be visible on the left-hand sidebar in your finder window. This process can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours depending how much data you have to move. Moving the iTunes folder copies over ALL of your iTunes content, including music, apps, playlists, and videos.
4. Once you’ve moved your iTunes folder, you need to tell your computer to look for the iTunes library in its new location on the external drive. To do this, make sure iTunes is not running, and then open iTunes while holding down the Option key on your keyboard.
5. A window will appear prompting you to either create a new library or choose an existing one. Because we’ve moved the library file, we are going to choose an existing one. The iTunes library file is located inside of the iTunes folder that you just moved onto the external drive. The file path should look like External HD > iTunes > iTunes Library. Once you choose the library file on your external drive, iTunes will continue to look for its library here, until you tell it otherwise. This means that whenever you add new content to your iTunes library, it automatically will be stored on the external drive as opposed to your Mac’s internal hard drive.
6. You can now move the iTunes folder on your Mac to the trash to free up lots of extra room (Please be careful and make sure you actually have moved your music before deleting it!).