I bought a Maxtor OneTouch4

Question

I bought a Maxtor OneTouch4 Mini 160GB external hard drive.The rason being that I wanted to increase my hard drive capacity--My laptop is below 50 GBs now and I intend to be doing quite q lot of video and pictures in the future.MY QUESTION IS>>> Is this the Maxtor just stictly for backup or can I somehow store pictures on it and a program to edit and store those pictures such as one of the "photoshop" series or "printshot22" ??