iTunes is a great place to download, store and access music, movies, TV shows, podcasts and much more. With the number of movies and TV shows that I have, however, I can’t possibly keep all of them on my MacBook Pro’s internal SSD. It’s just not big enough! By default, iTunes will show me all movies and TV shows that I have within my local library as well as those that I have previosuly purchased from the iTunes Store. This is a really cool feature when you have a fast connection and you want to stream content that was previously purchased but you don’t want to store locally. In some cases, I want to only see content that I have on my internal drive (when I have a slow connection, for example).
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to switch back and forth between these views. Here’s how.
First, let’s open iTunes and go to Preferences (iTunes > Preferences…). With Preferences open, we will click on the “Store" tab at the top. About halfway down, you will see a checkbox for labelled “Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases”.
If this option is CHECKED, you will see a list of all local movies and TV shows as well as content that you have previously purchased through iTunes. If this option is UNCHECKED, you will only see content that you have stored locally, hiding your iTunes Store purchases from your view.
One thing to keep in mind… if you are showing all local and cloud-based content, you can still quickly see what content is stored locally and what content is cloud-based. Cloud-based (streaming) content will have a small cloud icon in the lower right-hand corner of the album artwork. Here’s an example:
