storing photos on external drive

[Suecan]

I have a 40GB external drive that I want to use to store photos and free up some space on my hard drive. I shoot my photos in RAW, edit them in Photoshop Elements and move some of them to iPhoto to create calendars, slide shows etc. My idea was to load PSE on the external and then move some of the photo folders from PSE on my hard drive to the external and delete them from the hard drive thereby creating space. When I copied PSE on the external it of course copied all the photos as well-now when I try to delete some of them from the hard drive, they also delete from the external. How can I create a "blank" PSE to put the photos in or isn't it possible. I hope this makes sense to someone out there who can advise me.
Thanks
Sue

 

[John Doe 57]

What I do is create separate iPhoto Libraries on my external drive. Then when ever I want to open a library, I just plug-in the hard drive and click which library I want to open. This saves TONS OF SPACE. For me it is currently saving me about 25GB of space.