Moving pics from Vista into OS X flawlessly?

[dgurevich]

Hi The Mac Community,

I have been using a PC for the last 15 years of which the last 2 were spent in thoughts about switching to a Mac – not quite a unique situation here, I believe. I have not made the decision yet but I’m getting close now.

I bought a high-end Sony AR61 just a couple of months ago and it is a great machine but guess what lets it down. I’ve been fighting with Vista, in particular trying to make it work with my old HP3310 All-in-One for all this time, yet I have to reinstall the HP drivers every other day – the system just refuses to work with the printer!…

Now what…. It is not the hardware that I’m worried about. My main hesitation about joining the Mac Camp is that I won’t be able to move my existing content flawlessly and quickly. In particular, I have about 7000 photos that I’ve kept organized using catalogs in Photoshop Elements for years. Is there a safe way to move this library in OS X environment without loosing the structure and metadata? Rebuilding the catalog structure from scratch in another application is simply a no go as far as I’m concerned.

I’m sure this was / is a common issue for many “switchers”, so can someone share their success story? Please help me to put my AR on Ebay quicker .

Thanks a lot, Dmitry

P.S. I have a 1TB TeraStation Live NAS on my network – does anyone have experience of using it with a Mac? It works quite unstable with Windows (both XP and Vista), by the way, but perhaps that’s a story to be discussed in another forum.

 

[MisterMe]

... I have about 7000 photos that I’ve kept organized using catalogs in Photoshop Elements for years. Is there a safe way to move this library in OS X environment without loosing the structure and metadata? Rebuilding the catalog structure from scratch in another application is simply a no go as far as I’m concerned.

...

Just copy over the top-level folder that holds your photographs and you should be fine. With 7000 photographs, you will probably be forced to copy the catalog over a network connection. However, you might also be able to use an 8 GB Flash drive. At any rate, you may use either the MacOS X version of Photoshop Elements or the lovely shareware graphics application, GraphicConverter to navigate your catalog.

 

[skybolt]

As far as moving your photos, if you will import them into the mac folder by folder your structure will be preserved. If you move them all at once, they will all come into one folder. Photoshop Elements is made for macs as well, so maybe if you purchased that, you could simply move your library as it is -- not that familiar with the software. Might be worth looking into.

 

[Consultant]

Photoshop element should be able to transfer your library (you might want to search).

Metadata are usually saved within the photo.

Folder structure does NOT matter if you have the proper metadata tags (then you can make smartlists of photos that update in real time without you messing with picture placement), but if you copy the folder, it will maintain the folder structure.

 

[Julien]

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