Transferring photos from SD card to an external HD

The instructions are almost exactly the same as they are on Windows:

1. Insert the card into the SD card slot.
2. The card will appear as an icon on the desktop, so double-click to open it. If you have switched to the Mac Finder (the desktop) and the icon is covered by a folder window, you can still see it in any desktop window by navigating to the top level of the machine. (In the Mac Finder desktop you can do that by the Go/Computer command in the menus. This is the same as going to My Computer in Windows.)
3. Navigate to the external drive and open a window for it in the same way you did for the card. Again, if you can't see the external drive, open a new window (File/New Window) and choose Go/Computer to see all connected drives and it should be there. After you open up the external drive you should now have two windows, this one listing the external drive contents and the one you opened earlier listing the card contents.
4. Select the files on the card and drag them to the folder on the external drive where you want them to go. Or you can do a Copy and Paste of the files like you do in Windows. (If you want to also remove them from the card, instead of doing a Edit/Paste do Edit/Move Items Here. That would give you the result same as a file Cut and Paste in Windows.)

One thing that could mess this up is if your external drive is formatted as NTFS for Windows. OS X can't write to that disk format without extra software. If the external drive is formatted as FAT or (Mac) HFS, OS X can copy files to it.

Also, OS X doesn't support dragging with the right mouse button to reveal copy options. If you're trying to do it that way, use modifier keys instead: Option-drag to copy files, Command-drag to move files.

Can you mount both the SD card and the external HD on your Mac's Desktop at the same time? If so, assuming the 2,000 pics are in a folder on the SD card, drag that folder to the open Finder window of the Toshiba.

AmPriSi wrote:

I am honestly not sure how to do that...

Do what? If you plug in the SD card, can you see it appear on the Desktop and/or in the sidebar of the Finder window. Same thing for the Toshiba? When both devices' windows are open, you can drag items from one to the other. In Windows, you have to copy an item from one location, go to the other location and paste it. It's essentially the same thing but the Mac way is more similar to manipulation of physical objects. Hence the Graphical User Interface description.