Store iPad photos on external drive

Sorry, no.

The Photos App will not directly access external devices and list photos in them except for import in specific circumstances.

You can export the Photos to the external drive, but will need to go through the Files App to access them later. They will not be available directly in the Photos app.

Michael Barrett2 wrote:… I think it is common knowledge there is issues with storage and photo libraries. This is an issue for ove half the iPad and iPhone users. Optimizing is not enough when you have thousands of photos that you want to access.

Actually, it's only a problem for those who bought hardware with so little storage. For our computers we buy external drives, but it's awkward to have hard drives dangling off our phones. There are many uses for 32 or 64GB iPads, but handling thousands of pictures is certainly going to be difficult. Then again, I have 17000 pictures available on my iPhone, and I can because the Optimized Photos Library uses only 6 GBs. That's pretty clever, I think.