Itunes from PC to Mac but kept on an external hard drive

Afternoon All,
I would appreciate any help I could get on the following query. After owning PC's for years that gave me nothing but trouble I finally upgraded to a 21" Imac two weeks ago.
I'm not a massive user of computers (Itunes and the other half has a load of photos) but given that this thing is so slick looking I've decided to pay more attention to the maintenance of it. So as not to clog up the hard drive I've decided to keep all my photos and music on an external hard drive (the same one I used to transfer from my PC in the first place). It seems relatively straight forward for the photos but not so for Itunes unfortunately.
I thought it was just a matter of changing the location of the Itunes files on the preferences tab in the program but afraid not. When I did this no music was comming up when I opened Itunes (I could however play them straight from the external hard drive but not via Itunes if you know what I mean). So what I have done since is actually copy them all onto my Mac's hard drive hence not accomplishing what I initially set out to do.
Excuse my ignorance if this is something that is straight forward but I am new to Mac's(And loving it !) and like I said I wouldnt be the biggest computer user anyway so would need it spelt out for me.
Cheers guys
Shane

Thanks Kappy and Allan. I had a feeling it was something to do with formatting the external harddrive all right, so I'll give that a go and let you know how it works.
Now for my next question - any idea how I would go about formatting a hard drive?
Regards
Shane

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