Transferring Files From PC to Mac

danny_bhoy

danny_bhoy

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After much internal anguish and many questions I've finally moved completely away from Windows and bought myself an iMac.

I want to transfer a chunk of my image files (mainly RAWs) from my PC to the iMac to form a new Lightroom Library. From my experience trying to transfer the odd file from my PC to Macbook via an external hard drive, it seems that I can't. The Mac seems to see those files a Read Only and won't allow them to be transferred. I know this has something to do with how the drive is formatted but I've no idea how to get around that without deleting all of the existing data on the external hard drive.

Anyone have any idea what will be the easiest, faff-free way of transferring my RAW files?

TIA!
 
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Format the External hard drive in FAT 32 or exFAT for larger volumes firstly before transferring anything and the format should be readable/writable by both a PC and a MAC. Avoids the formats of NTFS (Windows) and Journalled - Mac) which can cause issues without a third party software interpreting the data, which sometimes can eventually corrupt.
 
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Save the existing data to a separate drive or usb drive if it has capacity firstly, as formatting the drive will wipe everything on there. You are effectively changing the way the drive records and reproduces the data stored on it by formatting it and introducing a new system (FAT). I have found this works well. Regrettably those using third party software (often supplied with External Hard Drives cannot cope with upgrades to the operating system from Apple) or becomes corrupted and cannot read the stuff there. Had experience of 'NTFS for Mac' systems failing in this way.

Better to adopt a universal, long established and tested means. However FAT is getting dated now and cannot cope with larger drives and is why EXFAT was developed and introduced.
 
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shreds said:
Save the existing data to a separate drive or usb drive if it has capacity firstly, as formatting the drive will wipe everything on there. You are effectively changing the way the drive records and reproduces the data stored on it by formatting it and introducing a new system (FAT). I have found this works well. Regrettably those using third party software (often supplied with External Hard Drives cannot cope with upgrades to the operating system from Apple) or becomes corrupted and cannot read the stuff there. Had experience of 'NTFS for Mac' systems failing in this way.

Better to adopt a universal, long established and tested means. However FAT is getting dated now and cannot cope with larger drives and is why EXFAT was developed and introduced.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info!

So in theory, if I were to just buy a new external hard drive and immediately format it to FAT, would I then be able to use that drive to transfer the files I need from PC to Mac (about 20-30GB in total)? Or would it then be incompatible with the PC?
 
Format it, (may take a little while), then transfer the files to the HDD and then onto MAC.

Note system and program files will not successfully transfer as with most such files, but you should be ok with pictures.

Do you have suitable software to view and manipulate the RAWs on the MAC as well as the PC? Photoshop may require a multiple license, as might other software. Phase One used to come with two licenses one for Mac and one for PC.
 
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Use Migration Assistant on the Mac, it's exactly what it's there for.
 
Just to add to @shreds - when I did it I bought a new external drive then afterwards used that as my 'Time Machine' backup for my iMac

Several years on my internal HD developed a fault and once the new one was popped in I set-up from the Time Machine drive (took about 14 hours!) but next day the only data I'd lost was a 1-hour slot between the last automatic Time Machine back-up and it going tits-up (technical term)

Never in all my years of computer stuff have I loved a safety/back-up process as much as I did that day :D

Dave
 
If the mac and pc are on the same network using wired connection, share the folder on the pc, browse the network from Mac to see if you can find the PC. Once connected copy the files to Mac had.
 
I have external drives and format ex fat or fat 32 and no problems reading on my macs or windows PCs it really is easy to format using disk utility on your mac :)
 
Just enable ntfs write in terminal. No need for extra software.

If you really must reformat use exfat, fat really should be retired and is no good if you have files over 4gb (large videos for example).

Personally I'd always prefer a files stem like ntfs or nfs journalled but AFAIK you can only natively get mac to write to ntfs, you can't get Windows to write to nfs.
 
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One thing to note regarding lightroom..

I am not sure how Windows and mac versions differ in storing the path to the images. For example the pc files will be on x:\folder which doesn't exist on the mac. So you may end up with your collections broken and in need of going through and locating the images.
 
Migration Assistant will get this done for you quickly and effortlessly.
 
1) To get a reasonable transfer rate, connect both to the network with an Ethernet cable. This may mean buying a dongle for the iMac. Or just rely on Wi-Fi and accept if you are using Wireless-N, it's going to take longer.
2) Create a network share on the Windows PC. Change the sharing and NTFS permissions to give everyone full access.
3) Connect the iMac to the network share - I think you can literally connect to a server in Finder - connection string should be something like smb://<computerName>/<sharedFolderName>.
 
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