Best way to move photos to Mac from PC

[NitroZip]

Since I just ordered a new iMac, What is the best way to move photos?
I have almost 1 TB of photos on external drives, but they are in NTFS format.
How can I change it all over so the Mac can use them?

 

[yjchua95]

Since I just ordered a new iMac, What is the best way to move photos?
I have almost 1 TB of photos on external drives, but they are in NTFS format.
How can I change it all over so the Mac can use them?

OS X can read and access NTFS drives without any problem, but cannot write to it.

You'll have to store the images elsewhere in a temporary form of storage and reformat the drives to either Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or ExFAT.

If you want the drives to be accessible across OS X and Windows, use ExFAT.

 

[Ledgem]

The above post is correct, but makes it sound as if you need to change something. As was mentioned, OS X can read from NTFS volumes without any difficulty. Since you're copying the photos to your Mac, just plug the drive in to your Mac and you'll be able to copy them over to your Mac without a problem.

 

[joema2]

If you want to just go one direction from PC to Mac, your existing NTFS drive can be read on the Mac with no changes.

If you will ever need to go from Mac to PC that hard drive will either require reformatting to exFAT (of course backing up your files beforehand), or get Paragon NTFS for Mac which enables OSX writing to NTFS drives: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

 

[IndyBob]

I also recommend Paragon NTFS for Mac. I have used it for several years and it works great. Reads and writes to PC drives just fine.

 

[cynics]

Is it possible to just copy everything to the iMacs internal HD then format the drive with HFS+ then copy everything back over?

I feel that would be the easiest thing to do if you have a large enough HD in the Mac.

I just used FAT32 when I made the switch. Luckily at the time I didnt have any file size issues to worry about.