I want to store my photos on a portable external hard drive.

I want to move my photos from my laptop to an external hard drive.  I already own a Seagate which is formatted for a PC, with photos already on it.  I do not want to lose those photos and have been told by Apple tech that the seagate can be reformatted for mac.  How do I do this without losing the PC photos already on it.  Is there any difference between photos transferred from a PC or a MAC ?

Yes, you can format the external drive for Mac but then you can't use it with a PC.  There's a way round this tho', if you format the drive to FAT32 or exFAT you can use the drive with both Mac and Windows PC.  Formatting the drive will erase everything on it so you should back up the data that you want to keep prior to formatting it.  Simply create a folder on the desktop and transfer the contents of the drive to it, format the drive (having verified that the data is in the desktop folder), then copy the contents of the desktop folder back to the external drive.  You can then delete the desktop folder, having verified that all your data is on the external drive.  There should be no difference between photos on PC or Mac so long as you're working with the image files.  However, if you're using iPhoto on the Mac then I think iPhoto stores everything in a monolithic database.  So that's a potential difference to consider.  Some PC software does the same but the database structures will be different and incompatible.  One caveat, if the external drive is holding the only copy of your photo library I would consider getting a second drive to keep a backup on.  If that drive fails you risk losing your whole photo library otherwise.

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