move photo shop to external hard drive

Jean - Welcome to the Board

As a regular user of Photoshop since PS 5 I would advise against installing Photoshop on an external drive. Many of the files are stored within the Windows operating system and in special folders within the OS anyway. Another point is that the transfer of data - program or image from an external drive is far slower than from the computer's hard drive and you would almost certainly notice this with program files in running PS which, especially as the CS and CS 2 versions can be slow anyway.

I am not quite sure what you mean by

- are you referring to the program files (these are highly organised by the install program ) or to your image files?

By all means store your image files on an external drive and read them from there and save back to there. In terms of organisation of these files my system may be of some use to you ....

I have three basic folders ....

Capture - this folder contains all images captured by my digital cameras and has many sub folders for, in my case, Location. You could use date of capture, type - landscapes, people, etc.

Image Bank - this contains more sub folders such as Image Scans (scanned slides), Work in Progress with sub folders having a 'temporary title', and so on.

Print Bank - this contains finished images with base sub folders - Monochrome and Colour, each one having sub folders appropriate to the title of the finished image which contain the final version of each image as an unflattened psd file, maybe a jpeg for my web site and other variations on the image plus the basic cut outs used, if any.