Apple Files to PC - advice

HJandR

Hi, my father recently passed away. He was a keen photographer and has >6000 photos held on an Mac Desktop. As part of clearing his belongings I would like to transfer the photos to view on a laptop PC. So far I have tried to connect an external hard drive to download photos (this does not work as the drive is formatted for use with a windows PC so files cannot write to the drive) I have tried a flashdrive/ usb and the files transfer VERY slowly, and seem to compress, plus many have errors and will not download. Can anybody suggest an efficient way to download and transfer the files for use with a windows PC ? Many Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Woodstok2000

Have you tried one drive, or any other cloud solution?

Neil_Jones

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6685612/apple-files-to-pc-advice

You need a third party solution to read APFS file system on Windows,
This might be of interest if you only need a reader:
https://www.diskinternals.com/free-apfs-reader-for-windows/

flaneurs_lobster

I'd get those photos backed up (presumably iCloud would be easiest) before doing anything else.

What format are the photos?

ICloud is accessible from Windows, do you need to download those photos or is viewing them enough.

Vitor

The claim that a USB stick is “compressing” the pictures is almost certainly a misunderstanding. A USB stick does not compress files by itself. Photos can, however, export converted or resized versions depending on the export settings. There is another possibility: if the Mac uses iCloud Photos with “Optimise Mac Storage”, some full-resolution originals may actually be in iCloud rather than locally on the Mac, which could explain very slow exports or apparent failures while originals are downloaded. Apple says “Download Originals to this Mac” restores the full-resolution files locally.

sheenas

make sure the photo are on an Apple iCloud Drive. then download the official iCloud app onto your windows pc.

MyRealNameToo

Format the HD to exFAT which both Windows and MacOS can read/write to. Alternatively you can get a NTFS app that will allow MacOS to interact with the drive without reformating it.

Obvously depends on the model of the mac, what sort of HD you are talking about and what sort of usb stick but in principle they can be as fast as each other assuming you consider things like the Traveller Max a usb stick (which it looks like) even though it has a SSD inside

mksysb

Are they both on wifi? I use winscp on windows to copy files from my linux machine to windows. If you can install the ssh daemon on you mac machine you should be able to copy the photos directly.

HJandR

Thanks everyone who responded, that gives me a number of options to explore, fingers crossed… My dad did have the data backed up on icloud, but unfortunately the payment was set up from his credit card and this was cancelled upon his death - so at the moment I am not sure what data might still be available on the cloud…but will definitely investigate. Thanks again everyone.

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82159555#Comment_82159555

iCloud cant be used for a full backup of their computers (it can for phones/ipads) but instead works like Dropbox or OneDrive. Depending on how full the local drive was you may find that the computer itself only has thumbnails of photos with the full file only existing on iCloud.

Apple tends not to be as harsh on cancelled subscriptions as others though, stuff is certainly at risk but generally if you stop subscribing they drop you down to the free 5GB plan but dont delete any overquota files just stop you uploading more. In principle if you do find photos are only thumbnails changing the setting to turn off optimisation would result in them being pulled down from iCloud as long as the mac has sufficient storage to hold them all

HJandR

Hi everyone, thank you so much for all your responses. Just to confirm I have managed to download the photos from the iCloud to a PC hard drive. Thanks for all your help !