Moving DiffusionBee Models to an External Drive Using Symbolic Links

DiffusionBee is an awesome, accessible way to run AI image generation models on your Mac, but they also take up a whole lot of space. And space doesn't come cheap on Macs.

There's no built-in way to change the directory where models are stored, but with a little jiggery-pokery, we can use symbolic links to move the models to an external drive.

A symbolic link acts as a pointer to another location on your file system, making it appear as though the folder is in its original location while actually storing the data elsewhere.

Here's what to do:

1. First, move your DiffusionBee folder from your user directory to your external drive using the terminal:

mv ~/.diffusionbee /Volumes/YourDriveName/diffusionbee

2. Then create a symbolic link that points from the original location to the new location:

ln -s /Volumes/YourDriveName/diffusionbee ~/.diffusionbee

Replace YourDriveName with the actual name of your external drive. In my case, my drive is named "Deposit", so the commands looked like this:

mv ~/.diffusionbee /Volumes/Deposit/diffusionbee
ln -s /Volumes/Deposit/diffusionbee ~/.diffusionbee

And that's it! Your DiffusionBee models are now actually stored on your external drive, but they will appear to still be inside your user directory where DiffusionBee expects them.

Verification

You can verify everything is working by:

1. Opening DiffusionBee and checking if your existing models are still accessible
2. Generating a new image to ensure the application can write to the new location
3. Checking the external drive to confirm new files are being stored there