Moving photos to new laptop & OS

[SHP]

I've researched in the blog, forum and Victoria's "The Missing FAQ" book about moving photos and all the LR files to a new laptop/OS, but I still have a question. Currently I'm working on a Windows laptop with all my photos on the hard drive but when I transfer everything to my new MacBook I want to keep the photos on an external hard drive. So my question is, when I transfer the photos to the MacBook do I save them temporarily on the hard drive and then move them later in LR to the external drive? I'd appreciate any advice too as I'm still fumbling my way around my new MacBook.

Thanks! SHP

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I've researched in the blog, forum and Victoria's "The Missing FAQ" book about moving photos and all the LR files to a new laptop/OS, but I still have a question. Currently I'm working on a Windows laptop with all my photos on the hard drive but when I transfer everything to my new MacBook I want to keep the photos on an external hard drive. So my question is, when I transfer the photos to the MacBook do I save them temporarily on the hard drive and then move them later in LR to the external drive?

No, why would you want to do that? You can save them on the external hard drive, as long as you make sure that the formatting of that hard drive can be read and written by the Macintosh too. That means you either have to use ExFAT, or you have to install a special driver (Read/write access to NTFS in macOS Sierra - Paragon NTFS for Mac®) on the Macintosh so it can write to NTSC disks (Macs can read NTSC disks, but not write to it).

 

[clee01l]

Welcome to the forum.
To transfer files from Windows to MacOS, you will need an EHD that uses a files systems common to both OS as Johan has suggested. However, if you don't plan to share this EHD with a Windows computer again, it makes better sense to reformat the EHD to use the HFS+ filesystem after you have retrieved all of the data from it. Things like Mac trash retrieval only work with HFS+ volumes. exFAT filesystems do not have user security and NTFS security only works in a Windows environment.
With those thoughts in mind. you might want to transfer everything to the primary Mac drive, then reformat the EHD and transfer only those files that you want on the EHD back to the EHD.
If you have not set up your Mac yet, you might want to take advantage of the Migration Assistant app that will facilitate setting up a new computer with an existing user. There is a free Migration Assistant that you can download for Windows that will prepare your Windows user and data, transfer that to an EHD and then you can run Migration Assistant on the Mac to set up the user environment on the Mac.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi SHP, welcome to the forum! How did you get on? It takes a while to get the hang of a new operating system, but you'll get there.

 

[SHP]

I need more help please. I upgraded to LR CC prior to moving everything from the PC to the Mac. No problem on the upgrade on the PC, I opened the new version of LR and it found my photos. Then I copied everything to the newly formatted EHD and transferred to the MAC. But I'm having issues finding the photos. If I choose the .lrcat catalog and open from there, the folder hierarchy is non existent. All images are showing in "all photographs". My folder hierarchy is year/month/shoot day (example: 2016/1JAN/2016-01-06)

If I open LR directly from the shortcut (not from the .lrcat catalog) then it can't find my images. I selected add a folder and pointed to my images on the hard drive which gives me the correct folder hierarchy but LR wants to Add my images from the HD to the Catalog.

I'm so confused What do I do?

 

[SHP]

Never mind!! I found my problem. Learning curve for me. Once I clicked on the Macintosh HD arrow to drop down the folders underneath, I found my folder hierarchy!! Yeah! I'm so excited This process of moving all my files & images from my PC to the new MAC has taken me over a week (evenings after work) and lots of reading & research, but I did it! I'm super proud of myself!! Thanks for all the blogs/articles/forum support and LR CC6 The Missing FAQ. I couldn't have accomplished this without your website!

 

[Hal P Anderson]

Good work! And a belated welcome.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Well done SHP! Sounds like you're off to a great start!