Transferring from Mac HD to PC HD

alexandermjoyce

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Hello all! I haven't been on here in a long while, but I have an important question.

I've been using Macbooks forever. And I've finally decided to build a desktop PC. For several reasons: affordability, flexibility in parts and building just sounded fun.

However, I have probably half a dozen hard drives full of images (RAW and edited) on Mac formatted drives. I'm wondering what the best process is to make those drives and their files readable on a PC.

Thanks for the help!
 
As most of the Mac disk formats are not recognized by Windows, you likely won’t be able to read the disk content directly on your new Windows machine.

The easy solution is to connect the two (and possibly other) computers on a common network (if you share an internet connection between the two, they are already in a network) and share the disk content over the network.

With the same set of mind, installing a separate network drive (either USB based connected to your internet router, or better a native network drive) to which you copy all your files, will allow you to store and access the files from any device connected to your network. (Don’t forget to backup to a spare external disk, thou)
 
Dunno if this is any help as it's something I've never done but there's a few videos on Youtube. Good luck!!

 
If your images are in jpg,tiff, raw will they not just transfer or does Mac save these different to pc
 
If you make the PC drive a shared drive the MacBook will recognize it and you should be able to transfer. As stated above the PC won't recognize the Apple format.

If your images are in jpg,tiff, raw will they not just transfer or does Mac save these different to pc

Mac saves them in the same file format. The problem is that PC can't read an Apple formatted drive.
 
I see, I move pics between I pad and pc on usb sticks, never thought of the format issue.
 
As most of the Mac disk formats are not recognized by Windows, you likely won’t be able to read the disk content directly on your new Windows machine.

The easy solution is to connect the two (and possibly other) computers on a common network (if you share an internet connection between the two, they are already in a network) and share the disk content over the network.

With the same set of mind, installing a separate network drive (either USB based connected to your internet router, or better a native network drive) to which you copy all your files, will allow you to store and access the files from any device connected to your network. (Don’t forget to backup to a spare external disk, thou)

I didn't think about share transferring via a network. I'll look into that.

However, I feel like RAW files will take forever. But maybe I don't need most of my RAWs anymore. There were just some shoots that I wanted to revisit my edits...
 
Do you have iCloud? You can get to it from Windows.
Macs can format drives for windows (fat32), so you could get an external HDD - even 2 TB are cheap. I had to do this when I was taking one of my Python class in school - I was using a MacBook and the labs were NT.
 
I didn't think about share transferring via a network. I'll look into that.

However, I feel like RAW files will take forever. But maybe I don't need most of my RAWs anymore. There were just some shoots that I wanted to revisit my edits...

The time it takes depends on the end-to-end connection ;)

As it is number of harddisks I would suspect that most are USB2 standard, i.e. 480MBps between the disk and the computer.

If it was USB 3.1 it goes up to 5GBps (and with 3.2 even 10GBps)


If you are using a cabled network, it should not be expensive to build a 1GBps connection end-to-end, paying attention that networkcards, router and cable support so. This would be twice as fast as a USB2 connection, so you would notice no slowdown compared to directly accessing the files on the disk.
 

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