Moving videos/movies/photos off macbook

[jrflat]

Hello everyone!

Kind of a newbie Mac user (1 year) and I have a question about what to do with videos/photos/movies that I have saved on my hard drive. I have a drone and GoPro so I have been taking a lot of video and pictures with them and just downloading everything onto my MacBook Pro from the SD cards so I can edit the footage and make videos. Right now in IPhoto I have several albums for all the different things we have done and some of them I do not need access to so I would like to move them off the hard drive of the MacBook itself. I also have quite a bit of raw footage from the drone and now I am wondering how to get it out of iPhoto/iMovie and move it onto an external hard drive. Once I edit it I really do not need that either but do not want to delete it all just yet.

I know I can just plug in the external HD and move files over but this is where I am stuck. Where do I actually go to find the videos/pictures to drag them over? If I do it right from IMovie/iPhoto I think it just makes a copy but it still stays in there. All of the footage (video and pictures) was downloaded into iPhoto and then copied into IMovie so I could select and edit it. Going forward I think I am going to download the footage right from my SD card to the external hard drive but I want to make sure that I can easily access it from IMovie that way.

Also I have an Apple Airport Extreme router and I have an external hard drive connected to it. Over the last few years I have moved tons of photos from my PC over to it to consolidate it but for some reason it will not come up on my MacBook Pro. Can I use that external hard drive for photos from a Mac and a PC or and I better off to but a new external hard drive and just use it for my Mac and plug it into the Mac directly?

Any help is appreciated and thank you in advance!

Thanks,

John

 

[KevinJS]

In general, when you are dealing with a separate drive, the default action is to move, rather than copy. Copying only happens when a single drive is used. So once you have copied the files to your external drive, you will need to go back and delete them from the Mac if you want to free up the space they occupy..

It appears that GoPro videos have a sequential naming convention GOPRxxxx, so use Spotlight Search to find them (Command/Space then type GOPR into the search pane)

The full table for GoPro filenames can be found HERE

Can't help with iMovie, because I've never used it.

How is your external HDD formatted? If it's NTFS, your Mac won't see it, because that file system is only for Windows. If you already used it for Windows stuff, probably your best bet is to leave it where it is and buy another to plug directly into your Mac. I use a Western Digital 2TB My Passport. I drag it around with me in my truck and it's never given me any trouble. Don't waste your money on a Mac version. They are identical to the "Windows" version, but about $10 more expensive. Just use Disk Utility to format it how you like - FAT if you want it to be available to Mac and Windows.

 

[jrflat]

Thanks Kevin that's helpful. I think I am going to just get a new HD for my Mac.