Another Method to Split Your Default Library with iPhoto Buddy

I have recently started using the application iPhoto Buddy and it has certainly made my iPhoto program run much smoother and has made it a lot easier to organize my photos. For those who don't know, iPhoto is an app from Apple's iLife suite that allows you to organize your photos easily into events and allows you to make use of easy and small edits such as sharpening, cropping, and other common post processing techniques.

With small photo libraries, the program is pretty snappy. But as your collection grows to several thousand photos you really begin to see the lag. The best way to counter this is to create several iPhoto libraries. iPhoto buddy lets you do just that.

iPhoto Buddy is a free application that allows you to take iPhoto and easily organize it into multiple libraries. You also do this by holding option while opening iPhoto, but iPhoto Buddy give you a nice gui you can play with while you organize your photos. Anyway this article isn't about iPhoto Buddy itself, but to explain another method that can be used to quickly spread your photos from your default library into the new ones that you've created.

Click here to check out the iPhoto Buddy homepage.

iPhoto Buddy's manual gives you two methods to transfer your files from your default library into your new ones. The first method is to put all of your pictures into albums and then manually export each of them out of your default library. From there you re-import them into your new library.

The second ones mentions copying your entire default library folder and then exporting it into the new library and deleting whatever you don't want in your new one. If you have a few hundred photos or already have them well organized it may be pretty easy to do. But if you are like me and don't even have the disk space just to make a complete copy of literally thousands of photos, then this would most likely not be the best course for you to take.

My method is somewhat like the first method but instead deals with the backups of my library that I originally made. Before trying out iPhoto Buddy I made backups of all my photos, putting them all into albums already and burning those albums into discs or transferring them onto my external harddrive.

Unintentionally I realized that because I burned my photos onto the discs as individual albums already, when I inserted the disc with my new library open I could drag the organized albums straight away into the library (same can be done with an external harddrive).

I guess this is only faster if you have backed your photos the same way I did, but for those looking for a faster way to split their iPhoto libraries, I hope it helps.