Backing up a folder of photos to an SD card

SD cards and thumb drives are not very robust. Instead, it is best to use a proper SSD to store important files, and of course backup that to another SSD drive (also spinning old HDDs can be used with enough patience because they are quite slow).

Format such SSD as APFS or HDD as MacOS Extended (GUID, case insensitive) especially to store Photos libraries to them because non-Mac formats like exFAT or cloud drives are not supported. For "loose" images you could use exFAT if you intend to share them to Windows/Linux users.

Welcome to mac

• I don't know what you have at home as far as computers. For one, like Matti said, use an external SSD, although I don't trust SSDs for long term backups so I network my windows PC to the mac, and send all my stuff to my PC which has conventional hard drive bays. (That's called, doing it the right way). ALWAYS make more then one back up if they are important to you, especially if your data is on an SSD. Also, I Do Not like things automated for me like iTunes and the transfer app. I came from windows, I like to drag and drop - and know where things are going. I use free file sync which comes in both windows and Mac. Great free open source program for comparing and making identical backups on external drives (and letting YOU choose what you want updated on the destination drive.

If these photos are on an iPhone, use the Image Capture app in the Mac mini to drag them off your phone. On a side note, if you are moving them from the mac to a PC, make sure SMB is turned on in your sharing settings. Because my files were out of order on the PC, I had to re do all my meta tags using a windows command line app called exiftool because of the way Apple names file names as numbers rather then something that makes sense, such as dates. If the file names were named by dates, I would have just been able to sort the files by date to keep them in some kind of order. I could have used meta tag data, such as date created or modified to sort file files in a list, but many of the meta data tags were corrupted from the photos on the iPhone.

Grayarea55 wrote: … I'm trying to backup a photo folder to a SD card.

I'm worried that we don't know what you mean by "photo folder?" Is this a folder of pictures in Finder? Or do you mean an album in Photos?

I drag the folder to the card icon. The clock icon in the photos window starts. The folder name is transferred to the card but it does not contain any photos.

OK, so it sounds like you're in Photos, so do you mean an album or a folder? A folder contains albums. Pictures are in albums.

How do you know that the card "does not contain any Photos?" SD cards are meant to show only pictures in a specialized folder. Follow Matti Haveri's advice and don't use SD cards for storage.

You cannot depend on Drag & Drop to export pictures from Photos. If you want to know more, see this:

Should you use Drag & Drop in Photos" - Apple Community

You need to use File>Export. To export original files, use File>Export>Export Unmodified Originals. To export edited pictures, choose File>Export>Export nn photos. Logiciswhyicame worries about the order of the pictures and their filenames. But that is entirely in your control with the Export dialog-- you just choose Sequential to produce a file name that shows order:

Then your picture files might look like this:

with your own title, of course.

If you choose to export by filename, then you will see the original file names. I give my pictures titles that include an index number, so I often export my pictures with my titles for their filenames. But, in any case, the filenames are up to you.

About backups: there are 3 kinds:

1. Incremental-- like Time Machine. This produces an hourly (or whatever) backup of all the changes that have occurred since the last backup. It should have it's own external drive.
2. Pictures-- the Originals should be stored separately from Edited versions. Frankly, I don't do this, because it isn't necessary.
3. Library-- we periodically copy the entire Photos Library to a separate drive. The Photos Library takes up less space and has more information than the pictures themselves.

In Summary

1. Don't use SD cards (or flash drives) for storage
2. Don't use Drag & Drop
3. Use File>Export to control the resulting picture files.
4. Backup with Time Machine and Library copies to external drives.