How do I transfer photos from iPhoto to a Seagate external hard drive?

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How do I transfer photos from iPhoto to a Seagate external hard drive?

Not very good with technology and could use some help explained as simply as possible...

I bought a Seagate expansion hard drive to save everything off my old windows computer. All the data transferred very easily and successfully.
I have now tried to transfer photos from iPhoto on my MacBook to a Seagate expansion hard drive but it says the hard drive can not be modified.

I am assuming this product is not compatible with both a windows and a mac but thought I would see if someone could help as there's quite a lot of storage left on the seagate hard drive. Basically do I need to get a different hard drive compatible to mac? Thanks

MacBook

Posted on Mar 3, 2015 5:53 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 3, 2015 6:03 AM in response to HF87

Hi

As you've found, the hard drive has been formatted for Windows. That format is called NTFS, and cannot be written to by a Mac. You have two options.

If you have the files on your drive elsewhere (i.e., if the documents are now ALL on the Mac), you can reformat the drive to Mac format. Open Disk Utility in your Applications/Utilities folder, select the drive on the left, and use the Erase tab to change the format to "Mac Extended Journaled". THIS WILL PERMANENTLY WIPE ALL FILES CURRENTLY ON THE DRIVE.

If you need to keep the drive readable/writeable by both PC and Mac, or you just can't erase that drive at the moment, you can purchase and install Paragon NTFS ($20) which gives your Mac the ability to write to NTFS drives. Note that this will work for you if all you need to do is drag and drop individual photos or albums onto the drive. If you want to keep your entire iPhoto library file on the drive, NTFS will not work for you and you'll need to format the drive to Mac format as above.

Matt

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

207,439 points

Mar 3, 2015 10:09 AM in response to HF87

I have now tried to transfer photos from iPhoto on my MacBook to a Seagate expansion hard drive but it says the hard drive can not be modified.

I just want to emphasize the fact that iPhoto Library packages can not be placed on hard drives that are not formatted OS X Extended (journaled). The must be on a local drive, i.e. connected by USB, Firewire or Thunderbolt, that is formatted as I stated previously.

You can store image files on your Seagate once you get the software to allow you to write to that format.

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