Will upgrade help me?

Question

Background:
I currently have more photos than hard drive space. After modifying, printing, etc my photos I have been then burning them to disk and erasing them from the iphoto library to make room for new pictures. I have an external hard drive but never did figure out how to let iphoto manage my library AND us an external drive to do this. When I tried just referencing it eventually my library got all messed up.
Questions:
Can I use an external hard drive but have iphoto manage my library with iphoto 6 and I just don't know how to?
Would an upgrade to iphoto 08 help me use my external drive but NOT have to do any special things to manage my pictures but instead let iphoto just manage everything?
Is iphoto 08 any more external hard drive friendly than iphoto 6
Thanks so much for any help.

Answer 1

April:
It depends on how you organize photos in iPhoto 6. If you use rolls as the primary organizational tool and they are in an order that you've created via roll renaming, it might be a little difficult to switch. iPhoto 8 has changed rolls to events and those events are arranged by date. That's OK when you're importing from a camera as it will use the EXIF Captured Date to make events for files with those dates (depending on the Event prefereces you set, i.e. 1 week per event, 1 day, 2 hrs, 8 hrs). Since you'' be copying folders or CDs of files into iPhoto 8, you'll want to set up the Event preferences as seen in the screenshot so each folder/CD will end up as one Event. However, that event may not have the correct date. I've not figured out what date iPhoto uses when importing files from CDs or other sources. It sometimes looks like the File Created date and other the file Modified date.
I like iPhoto 8 for it's editing improvements and it's ease of publishing web galleries. A big improvement IMO.
If your photos are on disks and not in folders you might want to first copy them to a folder on the Desktop, name that folder with info regarding content and date ( I use something like this for each shoot or import: 09/20/07-08/04/07-Christening and Birthday). Then even if the event is out of order date wise you can easily find it, reset the dates with iPhoto's new Change Date feature.
The event feature does take a little getting used to but it's not hard to get the hang of. Start with only a few imports from CDs and experiment with getting the event date the way you want, etc. Once you're got a workflow organized then you can attack the rest of the CD.
IMPORTANT: I forgot to ask how were those CDs burned. If they were via the Share->Burn menu option then all you need to do is create a new iPhoto 8 library, mount the CD and copy the photos/rolls/albums to the new library. This demo shows albums being imported from disk but it also works for rolls. If you burned rolls that way they will be imported as Events and the keywords and comments will be maintained.
I can't say you need iPhoto 8 for organizational reasons but for its new editing and gallery features I would recommend it. It is better but a little different and takes a little getting used to.