Years ago I used a PC, and stored lots of photos on an external hard drive formatted for the PC (NTFS). The PC was fried in a lightning strike, but the HD was still intact. Now I use a MacBook Air and want to move those photos to this computer. I haven't found an answer to that exact scenario, and I don't want to do any damage to the photos. Thanks for any help you can give!
Basically, put the HD into a good external USB or Thunderbolt enclosure, connect it to your MacBook Air and use the Finder to copy files from the HD to your Air. (macOS can read NTFS formatted disks.)
If you intend to use the Photos app, you would open Photos; then, in Photos, do File > Import, navigate to the photos on your external HD and import them.
If you need more help, let us know the exact make & model of the HD; we can recommend good external enclosures to use with the drive.
Basically, put the HD into a good external USB or Thunderbolt enclosure, connect it to your MacBook Air and use the Finder to copy files from the HD to your Air. (macOS can read NTFS formatted disks.)
If you intend to use the Photos app, you would open Photos; then, in Photos, do File > Import, navigate to the photos on your external HD and import them.
If you need more help, let us know the exact make & model of the HD; we can recommend good external enclosures to use with the drive.
You should be able to copy them from the external drive to the Mac. macOS is designed to read (but not write) NTFS formatted drives.
Thank you SO much! I think we were making it much harder than it needed to be! I've just moved over 40GB of photos!
Great info, and we have just done a successful transfer of over 40GB of photos! Thanks for helping out a couple of old fogies!
You are most welcome!
You're welcome. Glad to help and that it worked out for you.
How to transfer photos from NTFS formatted external hard drive (PC) to MacBook
