IPhoto - External Drive?

Just wondering, do any of you use an external drive for IPhoto?? I'm wondering how anyone who takes a lot of digital photos would possibly fit them onto 1 hard drive.
I'm new to Mac (2010 Macbook Pro) and IPhoto, and just trying to get started, getting my pics into IPhoto. Do I just start fresh and somehow point IPhoto to my external drive?

Thanks!

 

I am not an expert with iPhoto... and I don't know anything about iPhoto 2011...

but.. I can think of a couple of ways to do this.

1. manually put all your pictures in a folder on the other drive, and when you import them into iPhoto, have iPhoto set up where it doesn't actually copy the pictures into its main library, so it'll just use it off the external drive...

2. What I'd probably do myself, its move my actual "Pictures" folder in my home folder over to the other drive, then make a symlink in my home folder pointing over there... so iPhoto and everything else thinks my pictures are all stored and kept in my home folder, but its really not.

To go the second route, you'd need to use Terminal.
In Finder, move the folder (move not copy... or you can copy then delete), your Pictures folder onto the other drive... then when it doesn't exist in your home folder anymore... in Terminal you'd do the following (renaming MyDriveName to your actual drive's name)

Code:

ln -s "/Volumes/MyDriveName/Pictures" "$HOME/Pictures"

your Pictures folder in your home folder will then look like an alias in Finder, and anytime you click on it, it will show the contents of the Pictures folder in your other hard drive... and iPhoto and any other app would see those contents as really being in that folder... importing into iPhoto with copying will put them all out on the external drive correctly... etc... symlinks are great