A good way to Move Photos to an external disk drive

The deal is my Apple MacBook Pro (2020, M1, 13 inch) with 1TB of storage is running low on space. Most of the space used is photos and videos. So I thought the simplest way to free stuff on the local hard drive would be to put it all on an external drive; I have a few 1TBs laying around. I know the first thing to do, BTW, is a good Time Machine backup. :-) But that said, I wanted to check if there is a relatively simple way to move all the photos - basically the whole photo library - onto an external drive, and when I run phtoos it can run it from there. I know I could get a bunch of iCloud storage and use that too, but I want to have a local backup, and also be able to run Photos without worrying too much about whether my connection is working. I don't mind taping it to the lid or something :-) By the way I am not a sophisticated user of Photos, I haven't used as far as I know any of the advanced file features and honestly never really got fluent with it. I'm just saving photos on the app as I download them from my phone. I am sure there is probably something simple. It's just not a feature/capability I have used yet. I thought to just drag the folder from the one with my username. But I am never sure if the file pathways and links will keep working, sometimes these things get messed up if you aren't careful. This question was almost answered here https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/193035/how-to-backup-export-photos-videos-from-the-new-photos-app-to-an-external-hard-d But the person asking wanted to know about making it Windows-readable, and I am not sure a) that the procedure would be the same, if it is, then no worries b) if it is applicable to OS Big Sur - again if it is, I will try it