How to move iMovie library to external hard drive folder? I would like to move all iMovie (iMove '11) events to a specific folder of an external hard drive. Apple documents a means to do this, but without specifying the folder; iMovie files are created in the root of the mounted drive, in a folder called iMovie Events.localized.

That's great, except my wife would like to do the same thing on the same hard drive. Since we want to keep our media libraries separate, having everything dumped in the same folder would be problematic. I could move everything manually, of course, though warnings abound that iMovie data should be moved only from within iMovie itself. Is there any way to tell iMovie to use a specific folder when moving the iMovie data for projects/events to an external drive?

Note: I tried to mount the appropriate user directory of the external drive as a separate volume using bindfs without success.

[Edit: As per a suggestion in the accepted answer, I am creating a disk image for each iMovie library. Please see the comments in the accepted answer for further details.]
Since iMovie doesn't have a setting to set a folder inside the drive and stores things at the root of an external drive, you can use folders to segregate projects quite nicely.



When you open iMovie, just right click on the name of the external drive and make a new folder. Make a second folder and name them for each of you. When you open iMovie, you can collapse her folder and vice versa to avoid having to see all of the projects for the non-active user.

You could also make disk images on the drive and store them anywhere, but that is a bit more tedious for little additional payoff. You would avoid having two folders made at the root of the drive, but at the expense of a more complicated storage layer. The down side is you still have folders at the root of the external drive as well as all the project footage is in subfolders rather than in their own folder.

The remedy for this is to create sparse disk images for each set of projects and mount them before moving content to each "disk". The iMovie visual will be as if you have two drives additional drives even though they are just files/folders on the same drive.



The only warning I have is when you have multiple clips referencing the same footage - avoid moving one and not the other. Moving all the projects to the external would be extremely robust and workable, but iMovie can be a little too aggressive in moving footage to a new drive without checking to see if other projects left behind reference that footage. Luckily, things re-link nicely once you discover the missing footage error and reunite the "left behind" project with it's partner and footage.