I will be away from my PC desktop computer/storage devices for a period of about 2 months during which time I expect to take a lot of photos. My plan is to store the photos on an external hard drive connected to my Mac Air travel computer, Upon returning home I'll transfer the photos from that external hard drive to my home PC for post processing in LR/PS. I've not tried this before, but understand that if an external drive is formatted to exFAT that it will be compatible with Mac and PC and this scenario will be possible. This is all new to me and I would appreciate any input/advice from anyone who has actual experience in doing this. I'll be dealing with a large number-probably several thousand-photos, so if there's a flaw in this approach I'd surely like to know.

http://www.paragon-software.com/products/home/

these guys have drivers for ntfs hfs+ and ext2/3/4 for Windows OSX and Linux also a conversion utility for converting an external drive between ntfs and hfs+
some are free or have trials $19.95 seems to be the going rate.


There are other free drivers available elsewhere too (google fuse and file system name and operating system).

The exFat format is pretty much universal but not security aware and has a maximum file size of 4GB (in most cases). If you need large file support that can be a problem.

However there is a free option share folders on your lan.
e.g a windows PC can share an ntfs formatted drive and a Mac a HFS+ formatted drive. The file system then becomes unimportant.

Finally consider a nas drive (network attached storage) basically a hard drive that can be attached as an external drive to a computer or attached to a network. A networked drive can be very useful if you need files available to several computers or even phones.

Some nas drives also double as print servers and will allow a printer to be connected to it.

so lots of options, a current mac should support ntfs out of the box anyway.

Why so many different file systems? Security, speed and robustness really.

Camera's tend to just support exFat but that could be handy if you partition an SDCard say ntfs and fat the camera will only see the fat partition the ntfs partition would be hidden which might be handy on casual inspection, putting the card in a pc and both partitions would show up.