How do I save my iPhoto program and/or my iPhoto photos

Question

I have a LaCie external hard drive which I use for backing up.
I have not yet figured out how to use Back Up but I do plan to (and it gets pushed away all the time).
QUESTION FOR MANUALLY BACKING UP (until I figure out BackUp):
How do I save all of my iPhoto photos? What thing do I look for to drag to the LaCie icon? The iPhoto Library? What?
FURTHER: How do I save the ENTIRE iPhoto program for just in case? (I have the room/memory for it.) Ideally I would like to be able to save the entire program and then add new photos to it as I get those new photos. Do I just drag the iPhoto icon from my Applicatons file to my external La Cie hard drive/disk?
Thank you.
— Lorna in Southern California
17" flatscreen iMac, 1 GHz Power PC G4, 768 MB DDR SDRAM   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   LaCie external hard drive, 111 Gigabytes

Answer 1

If all you want is a backup copy of your iPhoto
application, control+click on iPhoto in the
Applications folder and select "Create an archive of
...". Drag the resulting archive to your external
drive (I'm not sure why you need to do it, but that
will get it done). Once transferred, you can then
delete the redundant copy of the archive from the
Applications folder.
Dear Brie Fly — Wow! I just now finished doing as you described. It took several minutes but that was the WHOLE iPhoto program. It says that it is a Zip Archive. I clicked onto it in my LaCie external hard drive and it began opening up............ and I decided to stop it from opening up for the time being.
Question remains:
As I add more photos to my iPhoto program on my iMac hard drive, can Backup add the new photos into the whole archived iPhoto program that I just dragged onto my La Cie external hard drive/disk? For Backup to do so, does the iPhoto program have to be "unzipped"? Or what?
And thank you for such a helpful reply.
— Lorna in Southern California