Two different OS: how to transfer photos to iMac?

Previously I have been using a Seagate Free Agent external hard drive to store my photos and viewing and processing them on a laptop running on Windows Vista. Now I have added a iMac desktop and would like to transfer some of the photos from the Free Agent HD to the Mac, but I understand that there may be a file incompatibility (NTFS vs HFS) unless I purchased third party software like Paragon.

My question is this: to be safe, can I burn those photo files from the Free Agent to a DVD and then use the DVD on the Mac (running Lightroom 3) without any hitch (or glitch)? If I can, then this will give me another backup option from those DVDs.

If the Seagate drive is formatted as NTFS it will appear as "read only" to your Mac. The Paragon software you mentioned will allow read and write access to the Seagate from the Mac, and is what I recommend using to transfer the photos. Paragon NTFS ($19.95)

My question is this: to be safe, can I burn those photo files from the Free Agent to a DVD and then use the DVD on the Mac (running Lightroom 3) without any hitch (or glitch)? If I can, then this will give me another backup option from those DVDs.

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Sure. Burning photos to DVDs for backup is a good method of preserving them in the event of a hard drive crash or other disaster. Of course, if you have thousands of photos, you would be doing a lot of work. That's where a good Blue Ray burner would come in handy.

Thanks. That was very helpful.

Are any external HD's actually formatted to NTFS? I always thought that they were FAT32 for the most part. I know that there are OS X Journaled formatted externals that are made specifically for OS X, but that's another story.

Doug

Are external HDD formatted to NTFS?

I honestly don't know. My external HD has 1.5TB and I assume it is formatted to FAT 32 (Windows)

dalite said:

I honestly don't know. My external HD has 1.5TB and I assume it is formatted to FAT 32 (Windows)

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If that's the case then you shouldn't have any problems transferring files between the two OSs.