londonfire Loc: NY to NC

I know there’s plenty of Mac folks out there and I know this is a dumb question but here goes. I tried to convert to Mac a few months back and bought a MBP and an Air for my wife. I just couldn’t make the transition at this stage of learning and went back to my PC’s. A while back I copied all the pics on my wife’s iPhone to her Air and they’re in a file called photos. About 10k of them. I’m trying to create a second backup to a portable Thunderbolt drive and I cannot copy the photo file to that drive to save myself. The drive has 2 separate drives inside which are called Passport 1 and 2. The drive is recognized on the Air and I’m trying everything I know to copy those pics over to the portable drive. My PC brain is used to right clicking and copy and paste. Please tell me the simple way of doing this.

wicook Loc: Alberta, Canada

You'll have to open Photos on the Mac, select all 10k of them (or use smaller segments like a year if you like), and export them using the File menu. You should be able to select the external drive as the destination. With 10k photos, I expect it will take a while.

londonfire Loc: NY to NC

wicook, thanks for that info. I’m trying that right now but I believe I did that once before. The result was all the pics sent to the backup drive in random order with completely unrecognizable file names. It’s copying again and I’ll let you know how it works.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

You can also get those photos onto your PC using iCloud.com

rpavich Loc: West Virginia

delete this comment

rpavich Loc: West Virginia

Why?

What's not happening that should be happening?



Perfect...copy /paste. it works the same as windoze.

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

Did you try drag and drop? That's the way I copy files from one place to another. Just select the files you want to copy and drag them onto the drive icon, or into the folder on the drive where you want them.

Just Fred Loc: Darwin's Waiting Room

@londonfire, I believe this has already been mentioned, but just in case: Photos is not a file but a program. It is an Apple program that is included with every Mac. It seems to me the photos you copied to your wife's Mac were imported into the Photos program. You can get them out, if you wish, simply by double-clicking on the Photos icon, which is in your Applications folder.

Edited to add: Your external drive may not be formatted in a way the Mac can write to. If there's nothing on it, you can reformat it using the Disk Utility program that comes with every Mac. Reformatting will erase all the data on a drive, so make sure there's nothing on it you want to keep (or you've copied it all off) before you reformat. My choice is usually to choose the exFAT32 format, which gives the drive the ability to read AND write data.

Some technical stuff, hoping to clarify and not muddy: Windows PCs usually use a disk format known as NTFS. Macs come with one or more file systems (and which is dependent on the version of the OS). My 2017 MacBook Pro that I just updated to macOS Mojave (10.14) has two: APFS and Mac OS Extended. The APFS volume is the hard disk. The Mac OS Extended is a "hidden" 17MB partition that stores machine profile information, and is not user accessible.

NTFS and Apple's file systems aren't automatically plug-and-play with each other. That's why whenever I have a new external drive, the first thing I do is format it to exFAT32 to make iit compatible with both Windows and Mac.

LA Loc: Little Rock, AR

This site tells it all: https://www.organizepictures.com/2016/01/move-away-from-photos

jdub82 Loc: Northern California

Has your portable hard drive been formatted for a Mac? If not, the files will not copy to it, even if you try to drag and drop. Some portable hard drives are pre-formatted to work with the Mac system, many are not. I would check that first.

Old Coot

Go thru the Apple menu to find the file called “Photos.Library. “Usually under the “users” “pictures” sub menusYou can copy this to your external drive by dragging it to the Ext HD icon.
You easily find the file using the search menu