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roadkill401

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 11, 2015
523
212
I know it might sound like a funny question but I would have thought that a 2014 iMac could handle copying files to an SD card so I can put my photo's onto one of those digital picture frames.

Now I try and copy the files it just hangs in the copy process. it creates all the files but zero length.

The SD card is formatted as FAT32.

So, as I have applecare, I called up Apple and was told by the support rep that the reason it did not work was because my SD card was formatted as FAT32 and that I needed to reformat it as Apple Journaled format.

Now I know that my Camera doesn't support Apple Journal formatted SD cards, and I doubt that my Sony picture frame does either. But is this an actual limitation of Apple that it cannot write to an SD card unless it is formatted at Apple ?? or am I talking to someone at apple that has less of a clue of how things work than my cat?
 
You're talking to someone who is wrong I believe. I'm pretty sure that if the Mac needed the sd card to be in Apple journaled format, then it wouldn't read it in the first place.
Idk what the answer is but I don't think it needs to be formatted as Apple journaled. I mean, you could try it. What do you have to lose besides a few minutes? Transfer your photos to the computer first though.
 
It can definitely write to FAT32, however there are still a couple of possibilities. First of all, how did you format the card? If there's nothing on it then I suggest reformatting it with Disk Utility to ensure that there's nothing wrong with the formatting.
 
I have not had all that much luck with formatting anything on a mac. Perhaps I am just doing it wrong. If I click on the disk utility and select the SD card and choose the correct file format, it says it's formatted, but then if I eject the card and put it into a Windows machine, then it still has all the old messed up 0k files on the card.

What I ended up doing was to re-format the card in Windows, and that seemed to work. I also figured out that I needed to put the files into a sub-folder to get it to work.

This mac thing is really confusing.. especially when you phone apple for support and they don't have a clue what they are talking about
 
I have not had all that much luck with formatting anything on a mac. Perhaps I am just doing it wrong. If I click on the disk utility and select the SD card and choose the correct file format, it says it's formatted, but then if I eject the card and put it into a Windows machine, then it still has all the old messed up 0k files on the card.

That sounds really strange. Do you have another card that you can try?
 
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