Combining Aperture Libraries on a MacBook Pro and an External Hard Drive

Hi all,

I'm hoping that you might be able to help me with a little advice!

Having taken the plunge and recently invested in a MacBook Pro, I have a couple of questions regarding use of the iPhoto/Aperture library.

I have already invested in Aperture for its' advanced editing features - which is great so far. However, the MacBook is the 13" retina with 512GB of storage - and, whilst still quite large, I'm worried that I'll quickly run out of storage as I do take rather alot of photos! So far, I've only imported my library from my iPhone and it tells me that I've already filled 20GB with photos (and I only had about 6GB of photos on my phone so I'm not sure what's happened there).

On my old non-Mac computer, I have approximately 250GB of photos which I'm reluctant to copy onto the MacBook for fear of instantly bogging it down by clogging up half of the memory. Ideally, what I would like to do is import the pictures (so I can still see them and still have a 'hard copy') so that they're in iPhoto - and then export the entire iPhoto library to an external hard drive (I've read about having it in the 'journaled' format so that should be OK). The EHD would then be regularly backed up.

However, for times when I'm away (eg, on holiday and fancy doing a bit of photo editing if I've got a couple of hours free), I don't much want to have to lug the hard-drive round with me.

Would it be possible to keep the "main" iPhoto library on the EHD - and then just import albums into it (from the MacBook) at regular intervals. For example, if I go away for a fortnight and come back with 14 new albums, can I merge these 14 albums with the iPhoto library stored on the EHD? I've read that Aperture can manage multiple libraries - but I'm not sure if it's designed to be used in this way...

Any help would be much appreciated!!!

Thanks,

James