Moving Apps and Artwork folders to external hard drive

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Moving Apps and Artwork folders to external hard drive

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Q: I have moved my iTunes music to an external drive, done the way shown in your moving iTunes music article. My question is how do I move my Apps and album artwork to the external drive also? I have an old computer and space is getting limited and I have lots of Apps and album artwork.

- Greylin

A: If you are using iTunes 9 or later you can update to the new “iTunes Media organization” by selecting the appropriate option under File, Library, Organize Library in iTunes. This will place your “Mobile Applications” folder into the iTunes Media folder on the external hard drive. Further, when you use the “Consolidate Files” option in the future the Mobile Applications folder will be copied into the iTunes Media folder along with your other media content.

Keep in mind that the “Consolidate Files” feature copies tracks rather than moving them, so even after you’ve updated to the iTunes Media organization and consolidated your files you will find that the Mobile Applications folder is still lying around in its original location. You can confirm that the apps in your library are actually in the new location by selecting one of them in iTunes and choosing File, Get Info. The Summary tab will display the path to the actual application file, which should now be pointing to your iTunes Media folder location.

Unfortunately, album artwork is another matter, as this resides with the iTunes database folder. The only way to get this onto an external hard drive is to relocate the entire iTunes database and related folders. This is a separate, manual process and is explained in more detail in our article on Transferring your iTunes Library.

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