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Franny4321

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 30, 2011
58
0
I certainly did something wrong this time. I wanted to import my photos from an external backup drive. The photos were put on the drive from windows. I used the drop and drag onto the mac. So far so good--then all heck broke out. Mac did not import the folders-just the pictures from the folders. Yes, in the finder window under my files I had over 4500 files (picts). No folders telling what the picture is of and anything-just the numbers. I am just waiting to know what I did wrong, so that mess will never happen again? I know the info is scare, but I don't know what I did to go wrong. Also in trying to clean up this mess, I would move the picts into folders (I made) on the desktop. Some would move, while others copied. After moving them, I would try to delete them from the finder window and they would disappear from the specific desktop folder. All I want are the picts in specific folders on the desktop, and have the finder window show desktop and folders. Can anyone help? Thx.
 
I don't know what you did, but you didn't just drag a folder over. There's nothing in the Mac OS that would let you copy only files inside of folders but not the actual folders. Are you sure you didn't use some photo software to import the photos?

If you still have the pictures on that external disk, I recommend deleting them off your Mac and trying the copy again.
 
I've recently used carbon copy cloner to export 400GB of mp4's from 1 ext. to another, a lot of these were organized into folders of genre. they exported perfectly. all were retained in order and in there folders without a prob.

i have not tried to export anything using ccc back to my mac though.

but i dare say that it would do as you need concerning folders and there designated contents.
 
Thanks for the relies. I don't know what I did to get into this shape. I will try again when I get over this situation. Hopefully, I will have learned something from this. I will get some photo editing software which will help with the downloading. I have waited to see what I might like best. For whatever reason, iPhoto did not come with macro. Thanks again.
 
If, from the Finder, you just drag a folder from an external hard drive to a folder on your computer, the end result will be an exact copy of the original folder and all its contents. That's all you have to do, you don't need any 3rd party software to copy files.

You didn't say what your goal was. Are you trying to import the photos into iPhoto? In that case, just connect your external drive, launch iPhoto, choose File->Import to Library, and select the folder on your external drive that contains all the photos you want to bring in. That's it.

Can you explain what you mean by "iPhoto did not come with macro"?
 
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