Yesterday I finally broke down and bought iLife '09.

I really wanted to upgrade iPhoto as i just got back from vacation with a slew of new pics. The last version I was on was iPhoto 6, so it was about time. My biggest problem with iPhoto has been the amount of space it takes on my hard drive. I have this laptop filled up to the brim with apps, music and photos and it just couldn't handle more.

After doing a bit of research, I decided to move my entire iPhoto library to my external and have iPhoto read it from there. With a 500g bus-powered little powerhouse that I have, I don't mind taking it with me everywhere anyway. So, I took the chance and did it, and so far so good, although I'm not deleting what I have on my internal just yet.

Here are the steps I did, in case anyone else wants to have their photos on an external like I did:

1. Locate your iPhoto library, located in your home folder, in Pictures. Copy the entire iPhoto library from your internal to your external. Don't delete it just yet. MAKE SURE YOU AREN'T RUNNING iPHOTO, if you are, quit. You should rename the old one iPhoto Library.old. You'll see why in a minute.

2.  Hold down the OPTION button and start iPhoto. You'll now be given the choice of two libraries to start with. Either the one you just labeled .old or the new one, just labeled iPhoto Library, which now resides on your external. Choose the external one.

3. Now you can go ahead and add all your new photos. In preferences I clicked off the option for iPhoto to copy the images into it's library, I like having my images where they are on the external, I've already sorted them out that way.

Now every time you start up iPhoto it will try to start this library. If you external isn't mounted it will give you the choice to open your internal one if you still have it, or it will give you the option of creating a new one. I'll be deleting my internal one soon, right after I back up all my photos to a dvd backup.

That's it. So far it works like a charm. Good luck!