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bh60954

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 30, 2011
1
0
Hello,

I am currently in limbo between computers, and I have been so for a little while. I'm planning on buying a new mac sometime next year. In the meantime, I have saved my old mac user profile to an external hard drive. I am an amateur photographer, but I was planning on giving family members various photos as gifts for the holidays.

Is there a way for me to access my external HD from a friend's Mac, and retrieve my photos from iPhoto without having to upload all of my data to their computer? If this is possible, what is the risk?

Obviously, if I don't own a mac, and I'm trying to give personal photos as gifts, I'm on a budget. Please help!
 
As I misread something:
If your friend wouldn't have a Mac:

Use the 7-day trial of MacDrive to have read access to the Mac formatted HDD and then browse to your iPhoto Library, which will most likely show up as folder.
 
Last edited:
Hello,


Is there a way for me to access my external HD from a friend's Mac, and retrieve my photos from iPhoto without having to upload all of my data to their computer? If this is possible, what is the risk?

Obviously, if I don't own a mac, and I'm trying to give personal photos as gifts, I'm on a budget. Please help!

As long as your friend has a mac, you won't need macdrive, as the mac will read the hard disk just fine. You could either navigate to the location where your iphoto library resides (on your external hard drive), and right-click and choose 'view package contents', to let you navigate to your actual photos that are stored in your iphoto library.

Alternately, provided your friend has a compatible version of iphoto, you should be able to hold down the option key when you start iPhoto, and when it prompts you for what library to open, choose the one on your external hard drive. Others should correct me if I'm wrong, but that should do the trick.

Good luck!
 
Hello,

I am currently in limbo between computers, and I have been so for a little while. I'm planning on buying a new mac sometime next year. In the meantime, I have saved my old mac user profile to an external hard drive. I am an amateur photographer, but I was planning on giving family members various photos as gifts for the holidays.

Is there a way for me to access my external HD from a friend's Mac, and retrieve my photos from iPhoto without having to upload all of my data to their computer? If this is possible, what is the risk?

Obviously, if I don't own a mac, and I'm trying to give personal photos as gifts, I'm on a budget. Please help!

I'm not quite sure what you mean by saving your user profile. Did you make a backup of your HD before your Mac departed? If so, it may be bootable on your friends Mac. Starting up with the Option key down would let you select the external drive. It would be like using your old machine.

Dale
 
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