Help with some Windows stuff....

[NDA]

I am helping an elderly friend recover some photographs from an old Sony Vaio laptop running Windows.

Despite being 90 years old, she has an iPad and iPhone and is entirely comfortable using most of the features. I am also an Apple user and unfamiliar with Windows.

She wants to be able to see a load of old pictures on the Sony, so I was planning to put them all on an SSD drive and then load them into her iCloud account. All good so far.

The Sony fires up and I can see the photos she wants in one of the directories.... my SSD (USB) drive can be seen in Windows Device Manager when plugged in - but I cannot see it on the directory 'tree'.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any pointers.

[MikeGTi]

I imagine you may need to initialise the disk in Disk Management, or it may just need formatting to NTFS if it's currently formatted to APFS (although you'd need to check you could then read NTFS on whichever version of MacOS you're using).

This guide explains initialisation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/s...

[NDA]

Ah - that could be it... I am using a USB disc that I use with my MacBook - so I assume the wrong format.

I should use a fresh USB drive by the sounds of it.

Thank you.

[geeks]

Why not just upload them direct to iCloud from the PC?

[eeLee]

if you initialise your disk, it will become blank. Do you have some USB sticks to work with that mind being formatted less.

You could also install drivers to allow access but this is annoying and I would not be installing stuff on her device.

This sums it up quite well: https://www.howtogeek.com/252111/how-to-read-a-mac...

[NDA]

geeks said:

Why not just upload them direct to iCloud from the PC?

I think this is probably the answer - I use iCloud (as does this elderly lady) but I never sign in (if you know what I mean), so wasn't aware you could upload directly.

[Cloudy147]

Yeah you can upload directly, assuming the vaio is connected to the internet.

If not, I’d buy a cheapo usb stick from curry’s or Argos and just copy them that way. The stick should work with both your Mac and her vaio “out of the box”.

[eeLee]

https://www.icloud.com

She logs in, enjoys the drag+drop experience. How big is her iCloud and what is the volume of images? 5Gb is free, 50Gb is the next tier. Apple is rather tight on this, in my opinion.....

[Steve_H80]

Format the usb to fat32 which should be read by windows and mac.
As someone said your cloud store might not be big enough so check it first. Uploading speeds are much slower than downloads, a lot of photos will take a while.

[Buttery Ken]

eeLee said:

https://www.icloud.com

She logs in, enjoys the drag+drop experience. How big is her iCloud and what is the volume of images? 5Gb is free, 50Gb is the next tier. Apple is rather tight on this, in my opinion.....

Also a Windows application that might make it a bit 'easier' if there's a lot of files:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/103232