A Windows Convert Seeks Help

The Mac may be great but after 20 years on Windows, it's not intuitive to me. I am using a recently purchased Mac Book Pro. Stumbling around but getting the hang of things until I tried to organize my photographs in an external drive. I read the reviews and settled on a Western Digital, My Passport Essential SE. Plugged it in and cannot for the life of me figure how to start setting up folders. I have seen reference to formatting issues, but I purchased a Mac compatable external drive. Could some kind soul in the spirit of the season help out of this quarmire! Thanks.

All hard drives are "Mac compatible."

I'm not sure what you mean by "start setting up folders." I guess I should ask where are you moving the photos FROM -- are they already in folders, or just "loose" in the Pictures folder, or organized in iPhoto, or what?

Did you format the external drive using Disk Utility? If not, that's probably the issue. My guess would be that the drive is formatted NTFS (the "new" standard for Windows formatting), which the Mac can natively read but not write to. If the problem is that you can't write to the drive, that's the problem and the solution. Just reformat the drive using Mac OS X Extended (journaled isn't required unless the external drive is also going to function as a boot drive).