Transferring Photos and Documents from a very old iMac

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Level 1

8 points

Transferring Photos and Documents from a very old iMac

I have a 2009 iMac with Mac OSX 10.7.5 that has been sitting in my basement for the past 4+ years and I want to transfer my photos and documents either to an external hard drive or to iCloud. I was pleasantly surprised when it turned on and I remembered my password. The photos and document are still there! The photos are in iPhoto and I have no clue on what to do. I have an old WD My Passport for Mac external drive but when I connect it to the iMac I cannot see the connection on the desktop or elsewhere. Any insight will be greatly appreciated.

Earlier Mac models

Posted on Jul 11, 2025 11:55 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 12, 2025 07:50 PM in response to amfisher70

The preferred filesystem for that Mac would be HFS+, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended, with the Journaled and NON-case-sensitive options. Any Intel-based or Apple-Silicon-based Mac could format a drive that way; you would need to go back to the 68K era or the early PowerPC era to find one that couldn't.

So if you are transferring the photos to a newer Mac, you could use the newer Mac to prepare the drive:

Intro to Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

Lion can also read and write to disks formatted using exFAT and FAT32. It can read NTFS-formatted disks, but cannot write to them without the aid of third-party drivers. There are commercial drivers for Windows that will allow it to read Mac-formatted disks, but if you want to transfer photos from that old Mac to a Windows PC, I'd guess that the easiest ways would be with an exFAT-formatted drive or with iCloud Photos.

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Answer 2

Jul 11, 2025 10:58 PM in response to amfisher70

The current Photos might not be able to open that old iPhoto library anymore.

But just open iPhoto, choose all images, and File > Export them out from the library to a MacOS Extended (GUID partition scheme, case insensitive) formatted USB drive (the old Mac does not understand the current APFS format). Then import them to a Photos library in the newer Mac.

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Answer 3

amfisher70 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 12, 2025 01:42 PM in response to Matti Haveri

Thank you for the quick response. How or where do I get a MacOS Extended formatted USB drive. My old iMac does not recognize my WD My Passport External Drive for Mac? I did erase that drive with exFAT n Windows as the file system.

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