Not able to 'MOVE' from from MAC to External SamsungT5

[spikey_dave]

Lightroom Version

10.4

Operating System

1. macOS 11 Big Sur

I am relatively new to Lightroom Classic but not photography, I shoot in RAW and use my iPhone occasionally if I don't have my DSLR.

I am currently importing all my photos from various places (a bit of a mess) to a neat and well indexed 1TB Samsung T5 External Hard Drive. I am using the YYYY/YYYY--MM-DD file and folder format. I use the latest MACos and Lightroom Classic software. I prefer to use external drives and back this up rather than my hard drive as i have a relatively small SSD in my MAC.

The issue I have is when I try to use the 'move' mode in Lightroom to move from somewhere other the MAC to the Samsung T5. I get the following error:

could not move a file to the destination folder because it is not writable or there is not enough free space

I have loads of free space. When I choose the Get Info on the Samsung T5 I cannot change permissions and it states custom permissions.

A workaround would be to COPY and then delete the original file but I am mystified as to why this is happening. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks

 

[Johan Elzenga]

At the bottom of the Get Info dialog you should see an ‘Ignore ownership of this volume’ checkbox. Make sure it is checked. You may need to click the lock icon and enter your Mac login password before you can do that.

 

[spikey_dave]

This is what I see when using Get Info on my Samsung, no padlock, no options...

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Your drive is formatted in ExFAT. That is a Windows formatting that Macs can use, but not very efficiently. If you want to share this disk with a Windows computer you’ll have no choice, but otherwise reformat it in the much more modern APFS. Note: Copy the existing stuff to another disk first, because reformatting will erase everything.

 

[clee01l]

The filesystem of "T5 Black" is exFAT. It is unmanaged wrt security so that both Windows, Mac and LINUX should be able to read and write. I'm not sure how the Custom Access was established unless the EHD has some sort of manual "Read Only" Switch that was found on SD cards.

Johan's suggestion to Reformat to the more secure APFS should solve that problem

 

[spikey_dave]

Thank you very much for your time and replies. I chose the FAT 32 for it's compatibility across Windows and MAC. I use MAC on a daily basis but do have a windows machine too... What I don't understand is that Import MOVE from one External Samsung T5 (ExFAT) to another works perfectly but if I try to move from the hard-drive to the external I get that error - I can think of two reasons: 1.something to do with permissions to move files from the hardrive to an external drive (any idea where I'd find those permissions???) or 2.trying to move from an APFS formatted hard drive to the EXfat external hard drive

The problem with scenario 2 is that I do that all the time with files all the time and have no issue.

Any ideas and is it really worth reformatting to APFS?

 

[clee01l]

Like I said I don't understand how that "Custom Access" got added to a exFAT volume. I think "Custom Access" is a new Mac term as I now see it on a (MS-DOS) FAT32 formatted thumb drive. Lightroom Classic allowed me to Export file to this "Custom Access" volume.
Did you format the drive yourself initially? I think Big Sur is seeing this as a removable volume and Lightroom Classic may not let you import to removable volumes any more.
If the volume is only going to be accessed by a MAC, then the APFS file system is most efficient.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

If MacOS sees this drive as a removable volume, then check that Lightroom has permissions to access those volumes.