Is it possible to transfer Photos from an Apple external drive to my MacBook Air?

If the photos are in .JPG files on disk, and you want to import them into Photos, you would launch Photos, then select Import… from the application's File menu. Within the Import window, you could navigate to a directory, select one or more photos and press Import or Review for Import.

I believe the button will change to Import (as a shortcut) if you select one photo, and Review for Import if you select several.

If you're asking if you can copy photos from an external hard drive to the internal drive, then, assuming you have enough space, sure! How you bring over the photos will depend on how they're organized now, and whether you intend to use Phtotos or a different program to access them on the MacBook Air.

If you're asking whether you can move photos to an external hard drive to free up space on MacBook Air, that also would be possible.

Note that you can have multiple Photos Libraries. The Mac doesn't provide good tools for working with two of them at a time, but you can set them up.

To get to the screen for selecting or creating Photos libraries, hold down the Option key while launching Photos.

If you are using iCloud Photos,

• Only your "system" Photos Library will sync with iCloud. All of the others will be strictly local.
• You may want to keep the "system" library on your internal drive to give the Mac more opportunities to carry out iCloud synchronization tasks in the background.

When you say that you want them to go to "my photos", do you mean that you want Photos to import them into its database? Photos wants you to keep its hands off its database, accessing the photos only

• Through the Photos application itself
• Through third-party editing tools invoked from within the Photos application
• Through other means that preserve the relationships within the database (e.g., making or restoring backups)

If you're not using iCloud Photos, you can turn off "[ ] Copy items to the Photos library" – but Photos really doesn't like it if you then move photo files behind its back. Easier to let it have things its way.