MacOS – Transferring from a Samsung Galaxy to a Mac

macosphotos

Is it ok to connect a Samsung Galaxy to a Mac for transferring photos?
I'm not sure if it is ok to do this with two different brands.

Best Answer

Zero problem. Just use the USB cable and transfer the files, or go by bluetooth if you have the time. Both work flawless. Airdrop also works if you want to use an app and transfer over wlan. If you use the USB cable, you will get a lot of mac files on your Galaxy's SD card file system, like a file called ".DS_Store" in each folder. This doesn't hurt, but you might want to remove them or wonder where they came from.

Get the DMG file you used to install

I personally used this one:
http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/content/SW/201206/20120626165207619/Samsung_Smart_Station_CA650_x.dmg

Mount it

A double click in the finder should do it

Extract the setup package

This will create a temp folder on your desktop that you may remove at the end of the procedure.

cd ~/Desktop/
mkdir tmp
cd tmp/
tar xf /Volumes/Samsung_Smart_Station_CA750/Setup.app/Contents/Resources/Installers/Samsung_Smart_Station_Lion_10_7.pkg

You can/should replace the pkg file with the latest that matches your OS (tested here with the "Lion 10.7" package on Yosemite 10.10, it worked).

Unpack the display driver setup package

cd sgfx1072.pkg
cat Payload | gunzip -dc |cpio -i

It replied 20340 blocks on my setup.

Uninstall the Display Driver

Now we're done, you can either browse with the finder or run this:

open Applications/SMSC/SGFX\ Uninstaller.app

Your machine will reboot free of this driver.
You may now remove the tmp folder that lays on your desktop.

Special thanks to this answer that helped me unpack the pkg files: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11298855/how-unpack-and-pack-pkg-file

MacOS – Can the Mac save photos from iCloud Photo Library, but not upload to it

Photos on the Mac can have two libraries. You could declare a new library as the "system" library that syncs with iCloud to get a downloaded copy of those images. That is the best you can do if you don't want all the Mac photos to upload to iCloud (short of using another program than Photos app).

If that meets your needs, you could hold option (alt) when you start the app to create a new library and/or switch between libraries. As you correctly observe, everything in the system identified library syncs up to iCloud. This syncing happens both ways in the background whether photos app is running or not.

I don't recommend two libraries in Photos for most people - multiple libraries sounds good to many, many people and after a while, the majority of them regret making two (or more) libraries. You could be the exception, but I'd consider trying to make one library work for you if at all possible. I'm quite pleased with letting iOS and my MacBook compress images as needed and my Mac Pro keep full size versions of everything. A 150 GB library takes about half that space on my devices that have less than 300 GB of storage and I've never once missed the quality of an image.