How can I store photos on an external hard drive and still manage w IPhoto?

The hard drive on my MacBook is almost full and I want to move my photos to an external hard drive.  Can I do this and still manage and organize the photos using I Photo?   I can export the photos, but when I do I lose the organization (Events, Albums, etc.) that are in I Photo.   With my new DSLR camera the photos (JPEGS) are really big and I am quickly running out of storage on the MacBook.  Thanks in advance for you help.
Jim in Seattle

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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