Can I delete photos from iPhoto after importing them to an external hard drive?

For a while my family has been experiencing extreme slowness on our early 2008 iMac running OS X Lion.  We tried many different ways to speed it up.  I recently bought a new external hard-drive and was going to put some of our media on the hard-drive.  Is it possible that I would be able to put my photos, videos, and music onto the hard-drive and delete them from my Mac to possibly speed it up.  Also is there is any other possible way to speed it up?

Moving the iPhoto library is safe and simple - quit iPhoto and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive - depress the option key and launch iPhoto using the "select library" option to point to the new location on the external drive - fully test it and then trash the old library on the internal drive (test one more time prior to emptying the trash)
And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto
And backup soon and often - having your iPhoto library on an external drive is not a backup and if you are using Time Machine you need to check and be sure that TM is backing up your external drive
LN

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