dusty3d Loc: South Florida

I use "My Book Studio for Mac" by Western Digital. Have used them for several years and never a problem.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

It is called Disk Utility and is located in the Utilities folder under Applications.

Be Careful!. Before reformatting be sure that you have selected the correct HD.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Virtually any drive will work on a Mac. It's best to reformat it as "Mac OS X Extended, Journaled", however. Apple Disk Utility does that in a few minutes. I have one My Book Studio that started life as an el cheapo Windows drive. I reformatted it ten minutes after I bought it.

However, my favorite Mac drives all come from www.macsales.com. They've been both the fastest and most reliable drives I've ever owned (and I've had dozens over the years!)

External FireWire and USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt drives can all be used as startup hard drives on a Mac, provided the Mac you're using has at least one of those ports.

blackest Loc: Ireland

I think you are slightly wrong here and there is a straightforward solution.

Apple decided to make NTFS formatted drives mount read only by default.
You can make a specific drive mount read write with an edit to fstab and creating an empty folder under /Volumes. However this is not very user friendly.

If you are running El-Capitan you can buy a third party driver from Paragon which works transparently and you will be able to mount any NTFS drive on your MAC it's relatively cheap and you will be sorted.

If you are running Yosemite or older versions of OSX you can get a slightly older version of Paragon's NTFS driver (they actually direct you to a third party site for the download) you need to register with them and they will send you a free serial number.

There is an open source option too, but Paragon's driver is easier to install and use. They also make drivers for other platforms and other file systems. E.g if you wanted to read a Mac format drive under windows that is also possible.

Anyway once you have Paragons NTFS driver your drive is just another drive to your mac. Use as normal.

Bonus software to find and install is xtrafinder which is much better than plain old finder with tabs and dual pane options, the ability to show/hide hidden files and more that one is free. It makes copying files much easier.

Werkendoc Loc: NJ

Best option is to buy a separate hard drive and transfer from your mac to the new drive. Leave the old drive intact. Unless you are computer savvy (and I am not) mine got all messed up when I tried to do it. Best of luck

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

If your only computer is a Mac, then you don't need to mess with NTFS drivers. Just reformat the external drive as suggested before and use like any other Mac drive.

Bogy2830

Ok...read all the responses, but this is soon to be 2021, most posts are several years old. So, in present day, is there an external drive that collects photos from multiple devices?
I have Windows Vista (Where most of my photos of old are), windows 10 (my hubby’s computer), Mac iPhoto’s on my desktop (ordered new one scheduled for delivery in mid-January), then there’s my iPad Pro with thousands of photos and my iPhone with large volume of photos.
Is there a single external drive I can connect to each of these devices to conveniently store all my digital photos on to one device? Easy, without a lot of tech knowledge needed... or do I live in a fantasy world thinking this can happen?

blackest Loc: Ireland

Well maybe the easiest way is to use a nas to collect your photos on to a single drive, have it as a share on your different computers and maybe create a folder for each machine, you could use an external drive for collecting the photos. Once you have them on a single drive then you might import into lightroom and that will naturally organise them by date taken (if the camera had the date and time set when you took them). Your bound to get some duplicates which is going to be the slow part.

I mean personally I use lightroom for all my photos and I keep them on a nas drive which I have connected in lightroom I also have another nas which backs up to another drive every couple of hours. Wasn't so simple to set up but it's easy now.

Bogy2830

Considering saving photos over to Mac’s Time Machine external drive.....can it be set up to only move photos over. Don’t need to save everything on my Mac to external drive. Just important stuff and I want to control that as well. Automatic saving everything to external drive is not necessary. I want photos and important spreadsheet data bases saved only. Is that possible? Or should I consider a different external back up drive that I can manage as needed?

Thanks,

Judy

Jrhoffman75 Loc: Conway, New Hampshire

If you want selective saving you need a product like GoodSync or equivalent.