External Hard Drive - windows files and photos - now going to Mac....

Can I just connect the drive to my Mac Mini and will it just load all my photos into iPhoto or will it end up corrupting the lot??

Years of photos are on that drive among other stuff thats probably no use to me anymore, but I don't want to lose the photos and don't want them just sitting there on the drive either.

Thanks for advice.

You should be fine assuming the photos are in a format iPhoto reads (they probably are). If the drive is formatted NTFS you will be able to read it without third party software. Writing to it requires additional software.

Slydude said:

You should be fine assuming the photos are in a format iPhoto reads (they probably are). If the drive is formatted NTFS you will be able to read it without third party software. Writing to it requires additional software.

Click to expand...

With this I presume you mean writing to the Ext H/D?? If so why does it require additional software?

Thanks.

Its a Buffalo 500gb HD

Apple doesn't by default support writing to an NTFS drive. It will read files from it just fine though. Your photo collection should be just fine if you are doing an import to iphoto. iphoto actually creates it's own copy of the photos and stores them locally on the macs hard drive. if this is a problem, i'm pretty sure you can change the default location of the library. My recommendation: if you have the space available, copy everything over to the macs hard drive first. Then reformat your buffalo external using apple's disk utility. Reformat it to ex-FAT. This will let you read/write using either windows or mac, and there is no "realistic" limit on single file size either. That's what I did with my external and its been working great.

yes I was referring to the external hard drive. Sorry for not making that clearer.

Macs can read or write to drives that are formatted FAT 32. Of course that carries the limitation that individual files cannot be larger than 4GB.

With NTFS drives the issue gets a little more complicated. Macs can read NTFS drives but not write to them natively. I think this is an issue with Microsoft licensing of some proprietary aspects of that file system. Here's an overview and links to some OS X solutions NTFS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ok Im going to give that a go and hope for the best:Blushing:

Thanks for the tips and links - much appreciated.