SAving for Mac and Windows

[huguito]

I recently switch to an Imac for my photo editing
I have my photos in an external drive that I have formated for Mac
The drive I keep as a backup has also been Mac formated

If I try to read those drives with a windows machine, will I be able to read, copy or edit the files in the drive?

Is there a format that will allow me to save, read, copy and edit in both plataforms?

Thanks

Hugo

[howardm]

no, Windows natively does NOT read the Mac HFS+ format.

Really your only choices are to get an HFS driver for the Windows box so it can read/write to the disks w/o you having to do anything else or reformat the drives to something like FAT or ExFAT which both, Mac and Windows can read/write but FAT is basically a pretty primative (read: crappy) filesystem.

https://www.paragon-software.com/products/home/fsd.html

[Paul2660]

You will need a program on both sides at least from what I have found.

Mac can't read NFTS, and windows can't read mac.  However, on the external drive, just format it FAT32, and both programs will be happy.  Believe it or not, windows won't format to FAT32 anymore, (win7 and up) so you will need to format the external drive from your Mac Disk Utility.  Mac calls FAT32 MS-DOS, but it's still FAT32.

On my Mac's I run Paragon's NTFS for Mac software. On both of my Macbook's I have the internal drive partitioned into a Mac and bootcamp drive.  The Paragon software will allow me to write to the bootcamp drive when I am booted up on the Mac. 

On the flip side Mediafour has a product called Macdrive.  This works just the opposite, so when I am booted into Windows, I can write to the Mac partition. 

Both programs work flawless and have never given me a whip of trouble, and both have very good tech support when you have questions. 

Paul C

[Lundberg02]

I recently formatted several external drives for use with Yosemite. Disk Utility offered to format in a Mac/Windows compatible style. Not sure what it is or how you use it but Google is your friend.

[BobShaw]

Mac can read NTFS, at least the current version. If you need to write to NTFS there are utilities you can add.
Generally once you go Mac there are few times you want to visit Windows, and I just use a normal Fat32 formatted USB drive for those occasions and HFS for everything else..

[howardm]

Correct, Mac can *read* NTFS but cannot write to it so if that (writing) is what you want, you're going to need something like Paragon (or Tuxedo or so)

[Paul2660]

thanks for the correction, to me if it can't write, then it can't do much anyway, but yes it will read it.

Paul C