iTunes and Lightroom: moving files around

I have a lot of things I want to do and need to do maybe sometime in the future I will put out a list here and see how far I have come with getting them resolved.

Most of them are pushed to the future because they are not particularly urgent and I just might have a work around of course my routine has a big impact on what enters the important and not urgent list.
Well one of such things finally caught up with me and that is clearing out the space on my hard drive. Over the last few months I have been going through occasional cleaning of my hard drive especially the download folder. But in the last 2 months I downloaded some podcast from iTunes, some courses from the iTunes U and downloaded the pictures of my mother-in-law’s birthday (story which will be told later) with my new camera which packs more megapixel than previous. All these ensured that I went way below my 20% minimum hard drive space. Once I observed this, there were 2 options opened to me, First was to get a bigger hard drive so I can let everything remain the way it was with more space but then it was a matter of only delaying the inevitable. The next option was to do the clean up. And this I did, albeit not totally rather just to deal with the main issues, moving the pictures and the iTunes library.

The iTunes library was simple enough, I just followed this guide and all it took was the time to move the files, while I left the library file on the desktop, I can live with that as well as it makes moving to another computer say a Macbook Air easier.

Moving the pictures on the other hand was not something I was so eager to tackle because I had read a few blogs and they all sounded complicated more over, my confidence was not helped by people complaining about how following some of the advice messed up their library. The complication was not in moving the pictures, that is just a drag and drop thing. the challenge was how Adobe Lightroom 3 was going to handle the move. To my greatest surprise, it was very easy.

This is what I did:

I moved all my pictures folders that were in the Picture folder to a new folder and named the new folder “my shots” while I left the lightroom catalog file in its folder in the Picture folder.

Then I launched lightroom and of course as expected, it complained that it could not find my pictures, then I right clicked on the main folder which lightroom identified as the current location of my pictures and I directed it to the new folder(this trick I learnt here) which now contains the pictures and lightroom did the rest. So I succeeded on all fronts and now I have more space on the hard drive, my pictures are now on the external hard drive and my iTunes library can grow as much as it wants to.

Well, since I had a few things to say about lightroom in this post, I might as well add that Ligthroom 4 beta has been released and it has a lot of good new features as well as improvements on some old features like the Develop module. Now you have more precise control over how your picture comes out. You can give it a spin here,