I need to clear some space on my MacBook Air so I can backup my phone. We have thousands of photos which are the culprit and I simply want to move the photos off the computer to the external drive. I bought a Seagate Backup Plus Slim and I thought I could just drag and drop but it's not working - the files can't transfer at all. Fortunately, using an external hard drive to move files is easy. Just plug the external drive’s USB cable into your PC and copy your files to the drive. After everything is copied, shut down Windows, unplug the hard drive’s data cable from the PC, and plug the cable into your Mac. Copy the Photos Library to the external drive. You can drag and drop. Wait while it copies over - this may take a while depending on the size of your library and the speed of the connection to the. A few high quality external and portable hard drive options from Seagate, HGST and Western Digital are listed below. Seagate 1TB Backup Plus Slim for Mac for $72.99 from B&H and Amazon.com or $88.
By default, iPhoto is a photo management program which comes standard on every Mac computer. But if you want change your Mac computer to Windows PC, then you need to transfer you all data from Mac to Windows PC. The most important thing is your photos and videos. You can transfer all your photos from iPhoto to Windows with simple steps. To do so, open 'iPhoto' on your Mac and select all your photos to transfer. Click 'File' menu and select 'Export' option. A 'File Export' window opens up. Select 'Original' option in 'Kind' and 'Event Name' option in the 'Subfolder Format' and then click 'Export' button. This will give you the photos in folder which represents the 'Events' in your iPhoto Library. Now you must export the entire event to Windows PC. Go to 'Events' view and select the event which you want to export. You may have to export all photos by year to make file management easier on the Windows PC. Make sure that you have enough storage space on your hard drive before doing this procedure. If you don't have enough storage space, then hust export a few albums from iPhoto and then delete them. If you choose 'Original' in 'File Type', iPhoto will not embed the keywords and GPS data in your exported photos.
Quick Tip to ensure your Photos never go missing
Photos are precious memories and all of us never want to ever lose them to hard disk crashes or missing drives. PicBackMan is the easiest and simplest way to keep your photos safely backed up in one or more online accounts. Simply download PicBackMan (it's free!), register your account, connect to your online store and tell PicBackMan where your photos are - PicBackMan does the rest, automatically. It bulk uploads all photos and keeps looking for new ones and uploads those too. You don't have to ever touch it.
Mac OS X do not support writing files into NTFS filesystems by default and you cannot copy files to external hard drive from mac. But Mac do support reading the NTFS drives and copying files from NTFS HDDs. Most of the Mac users don’t know this and will buy portable external hard disks to expand the storage space. If you bought one, don’t worry 3 solutions are for you.
Cannot copy files to external hard drive from mac ?
Solution 1. Format the Hard disk with ExFat file system (Windows and Mac will fully support it)
Solution 2. A Third party utility to support read and write operations on NTFS file system.
Solution 3. Using simple tweaks play on your Mac OS X.
1. Format the Hard disk with ExFat file system
If you go for the first solution, simply backup all the data and connect your external hard disk to your MAC and follow the steps
- Connect your Portable External Hard drive and open “Disk Utility”
- Select the External Disk on the left section, and click on the “ERASE” tab and format as ExFAT file system
2. Third party software for NTFS support on Mac
Second solution is a third party utility that adds NTFS drivers for Mac. Go for “Paragon NTFS for Mac” which is a paid software. Download and install it.
If you are using Seagate external hard disk, the download free copy of “Paragon NTFS” thats comes absolutely free and only works with Seagate branded portable hard disks. Download Paragon NTFS for Seagate made Portable Hard disks.
3. NTFS write support for MAC using simple OS X Tweaks
Its a bit skill oriented task, so follow it carefully and at your own risk.
First connect your NTFS Drive into the Mac and open “Terminal” application and run the below command to find the UUID of your External NTFS Hard Disk. (My NTFS HDD name is “TOSHIBA”, Edit with your own Mac HDD name)
diskutil info /Volumes/TOSHIBA | grep UUID
Sample output:
Volume UUID: 45125EB1-E1C3-3D21-9484-32DE22FEF0
Now enable read/write support for the Hard drive (based on UUID) run the below command, edit with your own Disk Volume UUID. This command add read write attribute to the /etc/fstab
sudo echo “UUID=<UUID> none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse” >> /etc/fstab
example:
sudo echo “UUID=45125EB1-E1C3-3D21-9484-32DE22FEF0 none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse” >> /etc/fstab
How To Move Photos From Mac To External Drive
Now you will be able to perform both read and write to that NTFS formatted Hard drive from that Mac. If you got another NTFS hard drive, Follow the steps again to find that HDD’s UUID and enale the rw/wr .