mac to pc photo transfer

[mac-illiterate]

Hi everyone,
It is my first post in this forum. As you can tell from my user name I am rather mac illiterate. I have had a mac for about 1 1/2 years but have thrown in the towel and gone back to the pc.
I took both my pc and mac to best buy for them to do the file transfer and after having it for 5 days I am no where closer to having my files. Well that's a lie they moved everything over but the pictures that were only on the mac(never on a pc) show that they are there but when I go to open them they show up as empty files... please help.
I have searched the forum and have found that using a LAN cable is one of the easiest ways to transfer files. My question is that if I use the LAN cable will the files still show up as empty?

 

[Hellhammer]

As long as the photos are in format that requires no 3rd party software to be opened, a LAN cable or any transfer method should be fine.

 

[agentphish]

Shame. The Mac is very easy and user friendly for the vast majority of people.

Do you mind if I ask what made it so hard for you to use and why you gave up?

There are a ton of great resources available to you free of charge from tutorials on apple's website to the free in-store workshops they offer (my mom takes advantage of these all the time) and the massive amount of other tutorial-based web sites that are out there and certainly the folks/guides on this forum.

My guess is that best buy didn't know how to get the files out of iPhoto properly.

Honestly, the easiest thing you can do is use a flash drive or external hard drive. You'd want to look at is how large your iphoto library file is. If it's pretty small (under 4gb) and you have a 4gb flash drive, you could just get your pictures out of iPhoto and onto the flash drive then copy them over to the PC.

You can right click (control click) on iPhoto Library file, then you hit show package contents. This will show you all the files that make up the iPhoto library. Ideally you'll want anything from the "Originals" and "Modified" folders. They should contain all your photos. You'll want to copy or move those two folders out to your desktop or another folder on your Mac if you wish to transfer via ethernet cable...which I will now attempt to explain.

If you want to network them together to transfer that way, just connect an ethernet cable between them and then you'll need to manually assign IP addresses that are one number apart and assign the same subnet mask...
Example:
PC: IP Address 1.1.1.1 subnet mask 255.0.0.0
Mac: IP Address 1.1.1.2 subnet mask 255.0.0.0
Once that is set up the machines will see each other directly. You'll need to click on and enable "File Sharing" on the Mac in the System Preferences under "Sharing". You can also add your folder where you copied/moved your pictures to earlier to the "Shared Folders" area while you're in the "Sharing" tab by using the "+" button.

Once that is set up, and if you've done it right, on your PC, you can click START button then hit RUN or in the SEARCH box type in \\1.1.1.1 which is the network address of your Mac. If you've got it set up right it will prompt you for your username/password that you have set up on the Mac. You can enter it, and a window will pop up showing the shared files that are available on the Mac.

Best of luck and I hope this helps and I hope you might decide to try the Mac again later!