Moving photos off of my mac's hard drive & onto an external without affecting my imported LR2 pics

Question

HI! A little info first...
I am a photog so I have thousands of photos that i work with from my Mac's Internal Hard Drive.
First, I upload photos from my camera to the Pictures folder on my Mac.
Then, I upload the photos LR where I choose the ones I want to keep and edit. I, then, export my edited photos back to the original folder they were in.
I backup daily using Time Machine, so I am good there, but my HD is about completely full so I need to MOVE the folders of Pics OFF of my computer's HD.
I know that if I move the photos off of my HD and onto an external, all of my photos will in LR will be lost (broken links?).
So, I have two questions...
How can I do this big move and still keep my LR folders in tact? Is this possible?
and,
Should I start a new catalog to begin my new batch of incoming photos? I have so many folders in LR now, that I sometimes have a hard time finding the folder that I need.
**I am using LR2
Thank you so much, in advance, for any help or suggestion!!!
Heidi

Answer 1

Hi Heidi!
   Okay, let's see...
i ADD photos to catalog without moving. and when i export...i export them back to their original folder.
So basically, you are elminating most of the functions of using LR in the first place.  So, let me explain a bit..
LR is designed to do a couple of things for your;  manage large collections of images, and edit images without destruction of the original image.
Let's take the last one first:  without destruction.   You are pointing LR at an original image (using the Add import).   You then use LR to do all the edits you like to it.  Then you Export back into the same directory, _overwriting_ your original.  This means that all of the history that LR keeps track of, such as your color edits, etc, gets wiped out.   That neatly negates LR's ability to do non-destructive editing.   Because you can't go back to your original, having overwritten it.
Do you have a reason why you shoot in jpg mode?  Or is it just because you haven't understood or tried raw mode?  The difference shooting in raw makes is quite dramatic in LR compared to shooting in jpg.  (And, it makes it almost impossible to overwrite the original!)  But that can come as a later refinement, if you wish.  Let's work on your current problem.
on the left side, under folders...i have about 200 folders from the last
year and i have about 60,000 photos total in my catalog. obviously, it
is getting hard for me to find folders when i need them even though i do
label each folder with the year/month/brief desciption (2010 december
xmas)
I think we have a different description of how you create folders.  If you have 200 hundred folders, you are not doing what you claim;  year/month/... Becuase that would mean you have been taking photos for 200 years!
Here is what I meant by folder structures.  I keep all of my images in a sub-folder called MainCatalog.  That way, when I do backups, I only have to grab that one folder, and everything below it is backed up.
Top level is major project, it's the one farthest left, below my parent folder:
MainCatalog
   family_farm
   rugby
   wedding
Under those catagories, each one has a year folder.
MainCatalog
   family_farm
            2010
            2011
And each folder under the year has month
MainCatalog
  family_farm
           2010
                 2010-01
                 2010-05
And each folder with month under it has the day,
MainCatalog
  family_farm
          2010
                2010-05
                         2010-05-03
                         2010-05-06
You could, for example, replace the bottom folder with a description appended to it.  You can see that this decreases the number of folders you have to scan to find what you are looking for;  by knowing the year and month, it's down to at most 31 folders.  This can be changed around; you could remove the top level project, and just use the rest of it, or move the project to the bottom... many ways of doing it.  One reason I chose this method is that LR will create all of the folders for me, I just create the top level major project folder.  Then in the import dialog, I point to the major project folder, and tell LR to import via the date format, and choose the year->year-mon->year-mon-day format.  Easy.
Now, as to moving your images to an external disk...
First, I would promote a parent folder.  This is done from within LR.  Bring up LR, and right-click on any of the folders you currently have, and select "promote parent folder".  This will have the effect of moving all of your folders into a sub-folder, and you'll now see the sub-folder at the very top in your list.  This is good.
And by finder, we meant the normal operating system's finder, not from within LR.  Some people move from within LR, some don't.  I find that if I use the operating system to move my files and later tell LR to reconnect them, I don't have problems with LR not being able to see the drive, as some people say they do.  Works both ways, but I obviously like my way better.
Now, as to moving your images... yep, it's easy, as someone else pointed out.  Just drag (move, not copy) and drop onto your new hard drive from your operating system.  Then when you bring up LR, you'll see '?' on the folder pane, saying LR doesn't know where these are anymore.  Right-click on the  top-level (parent) folder that you promoted, and browse to the new location and LR will connect them again.  The reason for doing the promote parent is that you only have to do this once; LR will connect all of the folders below it if they are in the same structure.
You don't need to upgrade to LR 3.3 if you don't need to yet;  I would recommend downloading Lr 2.7, however, as it fixed a few bugs in 2.6.  And it's a free upgrade.  With your current worfflow, there isn't a dramatic improvement in using 3.3.  The improvements are mostly for raw files, and many people have found that 3.3 is slower in regards to 2.6/2.7.
Does that make sense now?
Cheers!