Have a WD passport 500G backup drive?

Time machine wont use it, says it has incompatible file structure. Also how do I back up photos in iPhoto on to it. Thats really the priority at this point.

thanks for the help guys. Im still learning.

1. Open Disk Utility on your Mac.
2. Reformat the external drive to use Mac OS Extended. THIS WILL ERASE ALL CURRENT DATA, IF ANY.

That's pretty much it. You can then open Time Machine and tell it to use that drive for backups.

I cant do that as it has all of our photos on it. So I guess the only solution is to go by a new drive, would that be correct?

edit to add, can I open the photos that are on the passport in iphoto now or how would I get them off of it and be able to use on this mac?

I'm a little confused, normally iPhoto libraries are located on the boot drive. Are you saying this is not the case? If you have an iPhoto library already on an external drive, then you need to clarify a bit what it is you're wanting to do exactly.

If you just have a bunch of photos on an external drive, I would simply import them to iPhoto (assuming you have enough free space on your boot drive to do so), then (once you feel confident that all the photos are in an iPhoto library on your boot drive) reformat the drive, then use it for Time Machine (TM will back up everything on the boot drive, including the iPhoto Library.

I used this passport backup drive on a windows based machine until this summer when I purchased this mac. I tried to backup some photos I have taken and put on this mac via iPhoto and I could not get them on the External passport drive.

Sorry for the confusion. Hope this clears it up.

Will it be possible to move pics from backup drive to a new backup drive using my mac?