Need Help moving photo image files

Hello everyone,

I am a photographer and have a 2009 MacBook Pro running Lion 10.7.5

My image files in Photoshop are very large (at least 1 GB ea.) and I'm at the point now where i would like to move most of them to an external hard drive so i can delete them off my internal HD.

I already have a Time Machine back up on an external hard drive but would like to have another external hard drive that is just for my photo images only.

Since I've never done this before i was wondering if it is as simple as just buying a large external hard drive (formatted for mac) and just plugging it in, dragging the photo image files to the external hard drive icon and then just deleting the files on my MacBook Pro internal hard drive?

I think thats all i do but i wanted to make sure before i do it

Any input you can give me would be most appreciated.

Thanks so much,

rick

That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

Just one thing of note, you can buy any external drive. It doesn't have to be Mac formatted. You can format any external you can connect in Disk Utility.

And keep in mind - do not keep these photos on one drive only - if you cannot afford to lose them.

If moving your pics to an external - you need to keep a backup of that external - same as you keep for the internal.

One of the easier ways for this is a dual drive mirrored RAID set up.
You're going to need to look at how much storage you need not only now, but 1-2-3 years from now.

I will offer a cautionary tale: My son-in-law set up his critical drives on Raid 1 (dual drive mirrored), but what failed was the Raid controller. When it went south, it wiped out both drives by trashing both directories. I'm now in hour 36 of the recovery process for him. Disk Drill is finding the files and writing them to a new drive, but he's lost all directory filenames and structures, so once I get the files back, he'll have to review all of them to re-categorize them. All that is to say that technology CAN fail, even if it's rare. So if you use Raid, you may still want to rethink a second location without a single point of failure (the raid controller). (Yes, I AM paranoid.)