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CC App "Lightroom classic does not have access to some Standard folders"

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camner

Senior Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2008
Messages
1,097
Location
Tacoma, WA
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
14.1.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 15 Sequoia
I bought a new M3 MacBook Air and installed LrC on it. Seems to work fine except for one thing. I intermittently get the following message: SCR-20250114-LR access.png

The thing is, as you can see from the screenshot below, I had already given LrC "Full Disk Access".
SCR-20250116-LR full disk access.png

If you give an app Full Disk Access, then in the Files & Folders pane in Privacy & Security, one sees this:
SCR-20250119-Files and folders.png
And, one then doesn't have the option in the Files & Folders pane to individually give LrC access to "Standard Folders"; Full Disk Access gives a superset of permissions to an app than just giving it access to Desktop, Documents, and other "Standard" folders.

When trying to research this, I came across a curious Note on this Adobe help page (with title "Allow Permissions to Lightroom Classic on MacOS"):
SCR-20250119-Adobe help page.png
"The dialog" refers to the original error message about LrC not having access to standard folders.

I interpret this as Adobe saying, "We know there is a weird issue with Lightroom Classic throwing up an access error message when a Mac user is also using Time Machine backups, and we suggest just ignoring the message."

Just FYI for anyone who may run into a similar situation.
 
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I think the explanation could be as follows: Time Machine will backup in a Mac Finder format. That means there are copies in a Time Machine backup of standard folders that Lightroom uses, and that might confuse Lightroom because it does not have, and should not have, direct access to Time Machine backups.
 
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Johan Elzenga said:
I think the explanation could be as follows: Time Machine will backup in a Mac Finder format. That means there are copies in a Time Machine backup of standard folders that Lightroom uses, and that might confuse Lightroom because it does not have, and should not have, direct access to Time Machine backups.
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This explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense to me (unless it is an LrC bug). LrC is not the only app that this would apply to. If this were an OS issue, I would think we’d see this message pop regularly with other apps that also could get confused by the presence of TM copies (to which an app should NOT have access) of original documents the app SHOULD have access to.
 
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The only thing I can think of related to Time Machine is that TM may put a lock on files that it is in the process of copying to the TM archive and while that lock is in place other apps well be denied access.
 
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camner said:
This explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense to me (unless it is an LrC bug). LrC is not the only app that this would apply to. If this were an OS issue, I would think we’d see this message pop regularly with other apps that also could get confused by the presence of TM copies (to which an app should NOT have access) of original documents the app SHOULD have access to.
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Not necessarily, so don't jump to conclusions. Lightroom Classic uses a non-standard way of accessing folders, through direct paths that circumvent the MacOS Finder. That may make Lightroom Classic behave differently than other apps, and so it may get into different problems as well. There used to be a special plugin (written by Adobe!) to make it possible to select the version of Photoshop, before that option was added to the Lightroom Classic preferences. The reason for that plugin was not so you could switch between "Edit in" the regular version and the beta version of Photoshop (there was no public Photoshop beta at that time), but to avoid Lightroom trying to open a copy of Photoshop that was located in a Time Machine backup.
 
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Johan Elzenga said:
Not necessarily, so don't jump to conclusions. Lightroom Classic uses a non-standard way of accessing folders, through direct paths that circumvent the MacOS Finder. That may make Lightroom Classic behave differently than other apps, and so it may get into different problems as well. There used to be a special plugin (written by Adobe!) to make it possible to select the version of Photoshop, before that option was added to the Lightroom Classic preferences. The reason for that plugin was not so you could switch between "Edit in" the regular version and the beta version of Photoshop (there was no public Photoshop beta at that time), but to avoid Lightroom trying to open a copy of Photoshop that was located in a Time Machine backup.
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Very weird! Thanks for this history lesson.
 
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Califdan said:
The only thing I can think of related to Time Machine is that TM may put a lock on files that it is in the process of copying to the TM archive and while that lock is in place other apps well be denied access.
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That’s a reasonable thought, but I don’t think Time Machine uses locks. Prior to actually backing up changed files a snapshot is taken of the state of the drive to be backed up. I know just enough to be (very) dangerous here…my understanding is that the ability to snapshot a volume is at the file system level, not the OS level.
 
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I continue to have this problem on an episodic basis. What I am now quite sure about is that the message about LrC not having access to the standard folders occurs right after my Mac has awakened from sleep, if LrC was open at the time the Mac went to sleep. But it doesn't happen all the time; I would say it's probably maybe between 10% and 20% of the time.

This is purely speculation, but I suppose that if for some reason LrC "wakes" before macOS has recognized that the internal SSD is available, LrC my complain that it doesn't have access to the folders and thinks it should.
 
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It has been a while but it happened to me again the other day. I did follow the advice to give LrC full disk access but it happened again.
 
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Zenon said:
It has been a while but it happened to me again the other day. I did follow the advice to give LrC full disk access but it happened again.
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I gave LrC Full Disk Access immediately after installing Sequoia
 
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