Using photos on external drive for movies, ipad, iphone

I have a question involving using my photos from an external drive on imovie, ipad, & iphone. Here's the background: my macbook hard drive was full with most of the space used by photos. Using the tips I found here and other sites, I bought an external hard drive and moved the photos there and set it up as my default drive for iphoto. This works fine; it accepts new photos, loads quickly, and opened up a lot of free space.

The main question I have is to find a way to get to specific albums where I can use them to make a movie. When I open imovie and I try to get the pictures, videos, it can't find them in the iphoto library of the hard drive and I don't see a way to direct it there. Similarly, before moving my photos, our ipad and iphones would include photos from the iphoto selection on the hard drive. Now that I've got external hard drive and wiped the hard drive empty, it is unable to find the photos and it's a bit of an inconvenience that I'd like to fix.

Is there a way that imovie can pull up photos from the external hard drive? If not, do I have to have the pictures and videos I want to use moved to the hard drive? If it is the latter, can someone tell me how I can select and then move the album(s) over? Thanks.

Just to clarify are you wanting to move your specific photos for Iphoto back to the hard drive to use with Iphoto?

Generally, I have found with Iphoto you need to manually add the photos to the iphoto library (like all Photo programs). I think Iphoto searches for any photo in the default directoy, hence why it didn't automatically add your photos to the library.

To add photos from external hard drive (or other source)

Open up Iphoto

Click on the FIle menu and click on the command > add to library. Navigate to the external drive where your photos are stored and then select the directory with the photos in it and click on. Iphoto then will import them into the databse.

You can do the exact same thing in Imovie as what I described here in Iphoto.

Just now getting a chance to work on the ideas mentioned. I tried resetting the default to the hard drive on the MacBook since iphoto won't open on it. It still won't open up. So I opened up iphoto with the external drive and got to the entire collection but can't get any file to open up where I can set up the photos on the hard drive.