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Kirwanfm

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 28, 2009
2
0
I'll be taking a vacation in a month, and plan to shoot a lot of photos. I use an iMac running OS X at home. For this trip, I will be using a small notebook running Windows.
I plan to dump images off my DSLR onto the notebook while traveling, with the idea of moving them to a flash drive for transfer to my iMac when I return home.
What kinds of issues might I expect to run into with my plan? I'm guessing that I will have issues with the iMac reading the flash drive, since I will have to format it for Windows. Is there another way to go about what I am wanting to do (besides buying a MacBook, or installing Windows on my iMac), or am I just off-base altogether?
 

aristobrat

macrumors G5
Oct 14, 2005
12,292
1,403
OS X shouldn't have any problems *reading* any type of Windows drives.

The limitation is that OS X can't write back to Windows drives formatted at NTFS.

It's been my experience that most USB drives dont' come formatted as NTFS, but since your Mac is just reading the photos off of it anyways, not being able to write shouldn't be an issue.
 

plinden

macrumors 601
Apr 8, 2004
4,029
142
Flash drives (I'm assuming you're talking about a thumb drive) normally come formatted as FAT32, which Macs can read and write to.

Even if it were formatted as NTFS, Macs can read NTFS drives, just not write to them. And you can get around that with MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.

But why bother using a flash drive anyway? Just turn on windows file sharing on your Mac and drag the folder with the images from the laptop to the Mac. If you don't have a router, you can connect the laptop and Mac's ethernet ports together (you don't even need a cross-over cable) and temporarily turn on internet sharing on your Mac.
 

pigbat

macrumors regular
Jan 18, 2005
219
0
I did this when I was traveling (and before I bought my macbook). It's really very straightforward. Put the pics on your laptop and when you get home drag them to a USB storage device. From there drag them into iPhoto.
 

Kirwanfm

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 28, 2009
2
0
Flash drives (I'm assuming you're talking about a thumb drive) normally come formatted as FAT32, which Macs can read and write to.

Even if it were formatted as NTFS, Macs can read NTFS drives, just not write to them. And you can get around that with MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.

But why bother using a flash drive anyway? Just turn on windows file sharing on your Mac and drag the folder with the images from the laptop to the Mac. If you don't have a router, you can connect the laptop and Mac's ethernet ports together (you don't even need a cross-over cable) and temporarily turn on internet sharing on your Mac.

Thanks, I'll give it whirl and see how it goes:)
 
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