add photos to external hard drive

Hi - yet again I have come up against a brick wall. I don't want to store all our thousands of photos on my new MAC but cannot for the life of me work out how to add a new folder to the external hard drive we store all of them on (and back up to another of course).

iPhoto does not let me choose where to save my photos and I cannot even create a new folder for the latest holiday in the ext. drive (I go to Finder > File but 'New Folder' is greyed out.

Life was so easy with a PC, if you are thinking of changing and you are not in your 20s I would say DON'T! I want to put our new MACs on ebay, but they were so expensive that we need to keep trying.

Before you say go to Apple Store for one to one, they won't help me because I bought the thing at John Lewis!

Is your external drive formatted with NTFS? Would guess that it is if you've been using it with your Windows machine.

OS X can natively read, but not write to NTFS partitions. To add the ability to write to NTFS, you will want to grab Paragon's "NTFS for Mac" - link.

copying photos to hard drive

Hi - thanks for quick response it is a brand new external hard drive, never used with windows, so I don't think that can be the problem. g

It can be the problem as over 90% of all new drives are pre-formatted as NTFS.

With a new drive and no plans to use it with a Windows machine - and "assuming" you have not placed any data on the drive as yet - open up Disk Utility and erase/format the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Hugely expensive white elephant

On second thoughts I guess it was formatted for windows as the shop probably was usisng that system when they recovered the data from the old hard drive.

However, I am reluctant to shell out more cash just to get this machine working properly. The guy in my local computer store was right when he said "Mac is great if you are professional graphic designer - for anyone else, all you pay for an expensive machine and then have to pay out over and over again to get it to work how you want." This has certainly been my experience.

If already formatted correctly, you might also try this.

You will pay for the same apps that you would pay for in Windows.

Windows is a Windows only world. It cannot natively write to OS X nor Linux partitions.

It is going to cost a little bit more money to be a multi-platform house than to stick within the confines of a single platform - shouldn't be any surprise there. That extra expense may or may not be worth it to everyone.

And it will cost you nothing if the drive is formatted for OS X rather than being formatted for Windows.
No difference than if you had a drive formatted for Linux or OS X and wanted to use it on a Windows machine - you'll have to get an app for Windows to enable write capability for different file types.

I'd be asking this computer expert, since he knew you had a Mac, why did he format the drive for Windows???

Thanks appreciate your time - have tried the previous but guess it is not formatted correctly as it won't let me drag the library to the ext.

we didn't have the conversation until afterwards as I didn't tell him we had moved to mac and the old (corrupted) hard drive was used with windows so I guess he made the assumption

Couple of options you have - move the data to your machine and then reformat the drive and move it back - keeps your expense at nothing but takes some time.

Or pay for the Paragon software. This is what I do - my backup drives for OS X are formatted for the Mac, but all of my data only drives are formatted as NTFS because I do use Windows machines in the house also.

OK - will do what you do and keep them separate - thanks a lot for all your help. g