Moving to Mac from windows

[Busted Knuckles]

For the live for all that is holey, is there a Mac for dummies? Trying to install dpp, move files from the camera etc. NOTHING is intuitive and the process is about ready to send me back to PC land.

Help!?!??!!

[Kayaker72]

Wow....I had heard they were getting more similar...converging in styles.

I guess not.

The PC world happily awaits your return!

[neuroanatomist]

Can you describe what happens when you run the installer for DPP?

As for connecting a camera or card reader (or using the internal SD slot), in Finder select Finder menu > Settings and on the General and/or Sidebar tabs, tick the box to show External disks. Then any connected memory card will show up on the desktop and/or sidebar (in a Finder window, locations section). You can just double click it, open the right one of the two folders and your images can be dragged where you want them.

[DavidEccleston]

I've not tried using DPP on Mac, so I can't help there. I use Lightroom, which just works on either Intel or Apple Silicon.

For moving files, I open two Finder windows, browse to my SD card (or CF from 7D) select all (command-A) and drag the files over to the other window where I want them. While dragging, one of the modifier keys (control, command or option) changes the cursor from having a + (showing a copy) to without a plus (showing a move).

Why move? If you copy then delete, Macs are annoying in that they keep the files on the card in a trash folder, so your card ends up remaining full. That would be fine, except you can't empty trashes per drive, only all drives at once, and what if you don't want to empty your main trash? You're stuck. It's kinda stupid, but usually not a big deal. If you're adventurous, you can remove the files with the command line instead, which will remove them without moving to trash.

Annoyingly, for the last few MacOS releases, there seems to be a horrible bug in Finder. I think it tries to read all the RAW files and build icons for all the files that you're trying to move. It used to be smart and stop building the icons when you started a copy, but that seems to be gone. It makes the copy *really* slow. Either wait until the icons have generated, or, again, do it via command line.

The biggest annoying thing when switching to Mac was that I used to always double click on my images to view them in the Window image viewer, and from there you easily move from image to image in the same directory. On Mac, if you double-click it opens just that image in Preview, which won't show you neighbouring images. Instead of double clicking, single click then press 'space'. Space is the magic key to open a preview of whatever you've selected in Finder... images (jpg, png, raw), videos, audio files, pdfs, whatever. You can just cursor up and down your file list.

[neuroanatomist]

Why move? If you copy then delete, Macs are annoying in that they keep the files on the card in a trash folder, so your card ends up remaining full. That would be fine, except you can't empty trashes per drive, only all drives at once, and what if you don't want to empty your main trash? You're stuck. It's kinda stupid, but usually not a big deal. If you're adventurous, you can remove the files with the command line instead, which will remove them without moving to trash.

I just copy them. I always format every card when I put it in a camera, every time. It’s a good practice, and necessary if you have >1 camera model and move cards between them.