Q: Run Aperture and iPhoto on an external drive and edit from laptop?

Did you try looking in the Aperture manual? It's very good!

•   Choose File > Switch to Library > Other.
•   In the dialog that appears, click Create New.
•   In the next dialog, enter a name for the Library in the Save As field, choose a location, then click Create. Aperture creates the new library in the location you chose.

http://documentation.apple.com/en/aperture/usermanual/index.html#chapter=3%26sec tion=3%26hash=apple_ref:doc:uid:Aperture-UserManual-91292STP-1008739

You can create library files wherever you want, just make sure the drive is formatted as an extended journalled drive.

If you want you can store your pictures on the external drive and keep the library on your internal drive. This is called a referenced set up, have a look through the manual here and these forums for more info on how to set this up, it's pretty straightforward once you get the concept.

I've no experience of iPhoto, though I assume you can create a new library on an external drive.

Hello Laura,

what is it, that you want to achieve?

1. Move the Aperture Library to an external drive to free space on your laptop?
2. or do you want to share your Aperture Libray between your machines and access it in parallel on a network volume?

The option "1" is easy to achieve, the option "2" is not supported by Aperture; Aperture (and iPhoto) are single User programs, see this:

     Aperture: Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library:http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3252

To move your library (or parts of your library) to an external drive you have two options:

• move the complete libary using the finder to a local, external, MacOSX formatted drive,
• or turn your library into a "referenced" library: relocate the master image files to the external drive, but keep  the Library itself (much smaller now) on your laptop. This way you can browse your images and rate them, use them as screensaver, even if the external drive is not connected.

Regards

Léonie

P.S. the same (*** grano salis) holds for iPhoto; you can move the library, or your libraries, to an external drive using the Finder; you can make the iPhoto Library referenced, but referenced libraries are much better supported in Aperture, for Aperture has been designed in espacially to support huge, distributed libraries - in iPhoto I found it it safer to have several smaller libraries than to have one huge, referenced library - that was one of  the reasons I moved from iPhoto to Aperture.

OT:  Ah ... the joys of auto-censorship.  Makes Latin elliptic. 

OT: Kirby, i tried three times to enter "***" and then gave up - obviously this saved me from writing something very offensive