How do I change the default ~/Movies folder location to an external drive on Mac?

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Level 1

4 points

How do I change the default ~/Movies folder location to an external drive on Mac?

This is the location where Imovies and da vinci resolve save their data and movies by default. My main disk! which is getting full.... so ... I moved all the files from ~/Movies to /Volumes/LaCie/VideoPhotos.

ot make sure the folder is not locked I did a

sudo chflags -R nouchg ~/Movies

but doing :

sudo rm -rf ~/Movies

cannot be done...

tried to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP)

csrutil enable

this can only be done in MacOS recovery mode....

it is getting really complex...

help anybody. ?

I know I can make a link or an alias to the destination folder, but It cannot be named as the default (for transparent usage)

ln -s /Volumes/LaCie/VideoPhotos ~/Movies2

:(

so I am locked into having all my default movies on may main harddisk ie ~/Movies ???

The 2T hard disk seems small all of the sudden. 200G left, after just a few months.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Mac Studio, macOS 15.1

Posted on Feb 24, 2025 12:23 PM

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Answer 1

Phil0124

Level 10

215,816 points

Feb 24, 2025 1:01 PM in response to marcwave

You are doing backwards.

You need to create a symbolic link from Movies to your external drive, what your terminal command there is doing is the opposite.

A Sim link from the external drive to the internal folder, meaning anything saved on the external folder, is pushed to the internal.

Remove the symlink and do it again as:

ln -s ~/Movies /Volumes/LaCie/VideoPhotos

This will cause anything saved to ~/Movies to be pushed out to the external drive.

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How do I change the default ~/Movies folder location to an external drive on Mac?

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