Need help moving photos to external drive
Hi, all--here's hoping one or more of you Aperture veterans can help.
Here's my situation: I'm not new to photography, but I'm new to Aperture. Just bought 3.3 and still getting to know what it can do. I'm an emigre from iPhoto, and one of the reasons I upgraded within Apple is that I was tired of the non-intuitive nature of PS Elements. I like to take pictures, not spend endless time in the dim glow of a screen digging through sub-menus for stuff, and from what I read, Aperture seemed more intuitive.
But now I've got a seemingly very basic problem that hours of poring over discussion threads and searching through the hundreds of pages of the manual has done little to address with any clarity:
How do I move (not just copy) older photos in projects to external drives, but in such a way that Aperture still keeps track of them, even when the drives are not connected? (The Aperture marketing I read/viewed clearly said Aperture could do this, and I'm running out of space on my MacBook Pro (15" from about 2008, running Lion) with lots of CF cards piling up.)
Info that may help:
-I need to move not just original (imported into iPhoto directly from the camera) photos, but also those I've adjusted in Elements, then re-exported into iPhoto (I would say "and now into Aperture," but as you know, there's no longer an import process b/w iPhoto and Aperture).
-I shoot mostly RAW.
-I have no idea whether the pictures are "Referenced" or "Managed" (for space reasons, I have yet to import any files directly into Aperture; all existing photos are from iPhoto, and if I was given an option when I set up Aperture, I don't now recall it).
-I have external drives with plenty of space to move older pix to (I also have multiple backups, including Time Machine, additional external hard drives, and DVDs)
Can somebody who knows how to do this safely please explain in clear language how to move photos as projects onto external hard drives so that Aperture keeps track of them via viewable thumbnails, even when the photo files themselves live on a hard drive that is not connected at the time?
Thanks in advance!
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.4), Aperture 3.3.1