how do I transfer a large number of photos to a flash drive that is viewable by a mac or pc??

Hi Pat1942:

As LarryHN has suggested you can format it using Disk Utility.

From top right of your screen select the magnifying glass (Spotlight search) and enter Disk Utility.

From Disk Utility Select your Flash Drive, use the indented entry.

From there click on Erase.

From the screen which pops up you can enter a name if you wish and select MS-DOS (FAT32) for format and click on Erase.

Kim

Hi Pat1942:

You can export them all to a flash drive, but I would create a temporary folder on your desktop, you could call it "Temp Folder".

Open Photos, select all photos you want to export.

From File menu, select Export, then Export x files.

It should show above screen. Click on Export.

Then select Desktop, Temp Folder and click OK.

All your photos should be exported to Temp Folder.

Now you can copy these to flash drive.

The flash drive is usually formatted as FAT32, so both Mac and Windows will be able to read then.

Kim

Hi Pat1942:

Flash drives come formatted as FAT32, so unless you have changed it thats what it will be.

To check connect your flash drive to computer. When it pops up on desktop, right click on it and select Get Info.

You should see something that looks like this. Check Format and see what it says. If it is different, let me know and I will give you further info.

Kim

An Apple computer will not read a FAT 32 formatted drive. If you want the drive to be read by both Mac and Window computers, it must be formatted EX FAT, which is an extended FAT 32 format. The Utilities app on your Mac should be able to format EX FAT.

-- Rich

Yes. I messed that up. FAT 32 is compatible with a Mac, but limited to a 4GB file size. Don't know what I was thinking.

NTFS is read/compatible with a Mac, but not write/compatible.

ExFat is also compatible with Mac, both read and write, and doesn't have the 4GB file limitation.

From what I have read, a Windows computer cannot read a Mac OS extended (journaled) drive, but because I don't have a Windows machine I have not tried it myself.

In any event, I think ExFat would be the format of choice if you want to be sure it is universally usable on both Apple and Windows machines, without limitations.

-- Rich

Hi Rich839:

I suggested FAT32 because every flash drive I have seen is formatted that way. Also for transferring Photos, I have not came across a photo which had problems being saved to FAT32 because of size. But as you said there is a size limitation and I encountered it once when trying to move a video file. It took me a while to figure out why it would not copy to flash drive. It was because of size.

If he was using an external drive, I would suggest formatting it for exFAT, but most people do not reformat their flash drives, they just use them as they are.

Kim

Hi Rich839:

I think you mean NTFS format. As you can see below I don't have any trouble reading the card from my camera which is FAT32.

Kim

To reformat a flash drive use disk utility in your utilities folder in your Applications folder

LN