So you're facing a dilemma the amount of content on your hard drive is growing at a pace that will soon have you needing to upgrade your internal hard drive. It's been a long-time since my first days of using a Mac where I've had this issue. In this case what's driving it is the rapid growth in my iPhoto library based on a couple of choices: 1) my decision to shoot any photos or movies from out digital camera at the maximum resolution possible (given that NAND flash memory is cheap and plentiful there is really no excuse here) and 2) my decision to keep a lot of the duplicate shots that would normally be trashed since the pictures have greater value than the disk space. My thinking behind these decision is driven by the fact that disk space is relatively cheap versus the content. However, as we start taking movies at an increasing pace and I begin to spend more time editing and publishing using iMovie08 the speed with which I've been consuming disk space has accelerated significantly. Rather than wait till I approached the capacity of the 120GB drive in my Macbook Pro I opted to take action now. Two factors drove me to seeking out interim solutions till SATA drive prices drop further: the first is the increased number of steps that you need to undertake to upgrade the hard drive in a MBP vs. my old Macbook, and secondly a desire to save some money and to try and fully utilize the external drives I have at home.
As I dug around the web for potential solutions the one surprising thing that I found with iPhoto is while its an easy to use tool for a beginning photographer it still lacks the ability to easily create and manage multiple iPhoto libraries. The latest release of iPhoto'08 enables you increase the size of your iPhoto library over prior versions but still remains very light in terms of functions to managing the actual library of photos. I realize that iPhoto is created for the beginner and that Apple isn't looking to clutter the application by pushing it towards Photoshop and other higher end applications but there is definitely the need to enable it to work with multiple libraries natively. You can get iPhoto to choose the library you would like to work with by holding down the Option key as iPhoto loads bringing up a dialog box that enables you to pick the library of your choice.
As I searched around the web a number of potential options came-up:
1) Was to undertake a manual replication of my iPhoto library as described in this blog post at Kassblog.
OR
2) The other option that I came across was a great shareware application iPhoto Library Manager from Fatcat Software. It turns out that iPhoto Library so far addresses my need to replicate my library to an external drive so that I could archive the movies we've created which have consumed the majority of disk space. While we wait for Apple to get its act together and update iPhoto to handle the surge in data contained within our libraries and the need to split libraries over multiple volumes/drives. While this still isn't the ultimate solution that I'd like which is to be able to have both libraries show-up in the sidebar of iPhoto on launch it will do for the time being.
