Can I just plug in my PC formatted Hard Drives (Vista) to my new MacBook Pro?

I am a new Macbook Pro owner. Have existing PC (Vista OS) workstation and Macbook Pro with Mountain Lion OS. All my photos are on PC formatted external hard drives. I have Adobe Lightroom loaded on both PC and MAC and would like to access the PC formatted external hard drive from either PC or MAC.
Do I need to download any special application to allow my MacbookPro to connect, read, and write to these drives? (I haven't tried to plug them in yet - afraid to damage them)
Do I need to reformat my external drives to a Mac format to make them run better?
thanks in advance for the help.
Jon

What's done is done and your probably full(ish) drives in NTFS format will remain as they are. When you add a new one to the collection, might want to investigate formatting it in ExFAT format instead. OS X will happily write on it as will Windoze. And you have the advantage over the ancient Fat32 format that you can create and store files over 4GB in size safely and without data corruption.

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Csound1 wrote:
If the OP only wants to read from the drive that would be OK, do you know that is what he wants?
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