Importing PC Files to Mac

wdw2003

Probably a stupid question, but I'm trying to import photos from a pc to a new macbook using an external drive and the iphoto program.

There's over 40,000 photos and apart from the macbook hanging a couple of times and me restarting it (disappointing), the photos that have eventually been transferred don't seem to have any file structure, so they're basically 30,000 (so far) random photos.

Please could someone tell me how to simply copy the existing file structure across. I can't believe it's not possible.

I haven't even tried Documents yet, but that'll be the next cry for help.

jayme1

yeah they won't be any structure in iphoto. (unless you can change it to folder view or similar)

if you copy them on to the drive from the windows PC

eg 'My pictures' as top folder then inside that folder is 'album 1' 'album 2' ect.
then connect it to the mac and copy those files into the 'pictures' (or wherever you want them) folder on the mac

that will at least keep them in the folder structure on the macs hard drive in that folder.

I do know iphoto works independant of the photos whaere you create an album in iphoto and not just a simple folder on your hard drive.

wdw2003

I've been copying for about 6 hours now and I'm still not finished thanks to all the freezes. I'm tempted to delete it all from iphoto and simply copy the photos on to Finder, although that probably won't be simple either. I'm not sure what the point of iphoto is if it's so unfriendly. There must surely be an easier way to import files from a pc, but I can't find anything so far.

vivajustice

I dont know about transferring your iphoto library, but there is an easy way to transfer files.
Hook up a ethernet cable between the two computers. On the Mac go to 'system preferences', then sharing. Tick the file sharing box and on the right where it says users, change 'everyone' to 'read and write'. Click the options button and tick 'share files and folders using SMB (windows)' tab and press done. You will have a public folder underneath your 'user' directory in finder. Thats where you want to put your files etc.

Under Windows go to 'my computer' and then 'network'. Your Mac should show up here if all is good. Click on it and you should see your public folder. Then copy (cant cut as for some reason you wont have admin control over it, even though you set read an write on the mac!) over to your preferred windows destination!! You can also drag files from your windows pc to this directory to share on your Mac.

If you dont see the mac on your windows network directory, click start, accessories, run. When you have run open. Head over to your mac, go to system preferences, network click on ethernet from the list and you will see the IP address of your ethernet connection. Head back over to your PC and in run, type -
\\123.456.7.8 - changing the numbers for your ip address. Make sure you include the - \\ - at the start and hit enter. Windows should now connect to the Mac through ip.

Hope this helps and let me know if you need more help!

thescouselander

wdw2003 wrote: »

I've been copying for about 6 hours now and I'm still not finished thanks to all the freezes. I'm tempted to delete it all from iphoto and simply copy the photos on to Finder, although that probably won't be simple either. I'm not sure what the point of iphoto is if it's so unfriendly. There must surely be an easier way to import files from a pc, but I can't find anything so far.

That's what I'd do - I cant stand iPhoto. Just copy the whole file structure across as described above.

wdw2003

I'm going with the nuclear trash and restart the process option. I now have 57,000 photos in iphoto in a gazillion different folders or whatever mac calls it. Is there a simple way of deleting them all? So far it seems to be one folder at a time.

vivajustice

Cant you just highlight the root directory of all the folders e.g library, right click and delete?

wdw2003

Vivajustice, I'll let you know when the wheel stops spinning. I seem to be stuck emptying the trash of 27,000 files from two folders. I don't know if it's not responding or is actually working. This is all much more complicated than I expected.

diable

I prefer Aperture.


Is the external hard drive formatted as a Fat32 partition?

wdw2003

I finally found a simple way to delete all photos, something like Select All, then Move to Trash. That was after an hour or so of deleting a folder at a time. I'm now in the process of following Vivajustice's transfer guide above and it looks like exactly what I'd expected in the first place. Hopefully I can simply hide the iphoto icon. I now need to find the best place to store the photos, as I'm not sure the Public folder is it. My daughter needs to copy photos to somewhere like the pc Pictures folder and access them easily so that she can tart them up for uploading to Facebook .

Diable, the external drive is probably NTFS. I have another drive I can reformat to FAT32, as I gather that's what mac needs to write to. I'll check out Aperture.