How to use my external drive

I have an iMac OS X version 10.6.2. I just purchased a Hitachi Simple Drive 2TB and have got it set up on a USB port. My plan is to use this external drive specifically to store and organize all of my many years of family photos. I currently use iPhoto for this and want to know if I can move iPhoto to the new external drive. If that can be done, how do I do it? I have searched the web for information on how to use external drives with no luck. I can read about which ones to buy, how they work, and all other kinds of things, but nothing specific on how to actually move programs to the external drive. Please help!

First of all; does the drive have firewire800? (FW800 is much faster then USB2.0 on a mac). If it does, use that instead of USB2.0. If not, oh well i guess.

Anyway, here is how to move your iPhoto Library to an external drive.
http://basics4mac.com/article.php/move_iphoto_lib

iPhoto supports having multiple libraries, which can be located on any drive you like, so I would suggest having the family photos in their own particular library located on the external.

You didn't mention any way of backing up those important family photos, so I hope you've got that aspect worked out as well.

sam.reader said:

Preferred data transfer method of external hard drives by most of the users around the world is through the USB 2.0
Not to mention that its faster and more secure against corruption than the firewall port.

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By "firewall port" I'm assuming you mean Firewire, in which case your post is blatantly false. Firewire is much faster than USB 2.0, especially at sustained transfers, hence why it's the standard of choice for HiDef camcorders.

Kash said:

By "firewall port" I'm assuming you mean Firewire, in which case your post is blatantly false. Firewire is much faster than USB 2.0, especially at sustained transfers, hence why it's the standard of choice for HiDef camcorders.

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sam.reader is some kind of misguided spammer, or bot.

He posts the exact same thing in multiple threads, and as you point out not only is it incorrectly worded, its not true.

laraelynn:

Word of advice: Storing valuable family photos or records on a hard drive may seem like a simple way of gathering everything in one place. And of course, with large hard drives like yours ( 2 TB ) you can store literally thousands of photos.

However, hard drives do fail. It's not a question of "if" it's "when". You could wind up losing all your family photos or having to restore them at a tremendous cost if the drive fails.

What I suggest is that you consider backing up those family photos to either DVD media or invest in a good Blue Ray recorder. Blue Ray disks can hold many times the capacity of even a Dual Layer DVD.

Regards.