PC Lightroom to Mac Lightroom (Snow Leopard)..Catalog and Images are on External

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nutsnbolts

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Ok, here is the situation.
I had lightroom 2.x on my PC Laptop which connected to a shared drive (external HD) that has both my catalog and images.
Essentially, I just purchased a MacBook Pro and having installed Lightroom for the Mac, I plugged my external HD into my Mac and when I tried to open my Catalog on my External Drive, it gave me this message.
"Lightroom cannon launch with this catalog. It is either on a network volume or on a volume on which Lightroom cannot save changes."
I don't know where to go from here. Can someone tell me step by step specifically how to go about this?
 
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Re: PC Lightroom to Mac Lightroom (Snow Leopard)..Catalog and Images are on Exte

It may well be the format of the external drive. Not sure though, someone else will no doubt chip in with something more definite.You could try making a copy of the LR catalog and preview files on the Mac and opening from there.
 
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As Lightroom cannot write to the disk I assume that it is formatted with the NTFS filesystem. OS X can read this but cannot write to such a filesystem. There are some utilities that allow writing from OS X to NTFS but I wouldn't use this for this kind of important work.

There are several ways to continue:

- As Geoff pointed out, copy the catalog and preview files to the MacBook and run it like this
- Copy all data to another (external) disk, reformat using FAT32, restore the data and the disk can be used with both systems

Or, when you don't plan on using the PC anymore, copy-format-restore using the OS X native HFS+ filesystem.
 
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And reformat the external to FAT32 from the Mac to make use of all its space! Windows can't format too big FAT32 volumes...
 
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anyway to figure out whether it is fat32 or NTFS through the MAC to confirm this before I go through the lengthy process of reformatting the HD?

Also, once I reformat to FAT32, will it be compatible back with the PC? The idea with the entire EXTERNAL HD is so that I can go back and forth and not be dependant on the machine (mac or PC)....that's why I kept the catalog and images on the External HD.

Could I just launch the MAC lightroom, read the images again or do an import into LR MAC. Once the import has completed, couldn't I just copy that LR back to the External HD?

Then again, if it's not write capable then I'm back to square one.
 
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Yup, it is actually NTFS. I did a "Get Info" on the mac. I guess I got that answer. so now the next step is to copy everything off the External HD. I guess I would lose all my settings and what not wouldn't I?
 
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Ok, I'm dumb, I'm not thinking this thoroughly. Excuse my noobness. I keep thinking that MAC and PC are not compatible Catalog files. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

1. Copy all the files from the EHD to the MAC or any other drive/pc/hd.
2. Reformat the EHD to FAT32. I do want the flexibility to go back and forth from PC to MAC, vice versa. I won't be "copy-format-restore using the OS X native HFS+ filesystem"
3. Once format is done, then move everything back.

IS this correct?
 
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Re: PC Lightroom to Mac Lightroom (Snow Leopard)..Catalog and Images are on Exte

Just a quick point, the LR catalog files are cross platform.
 
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[quote author=nutsnbolts link=topic=8312.msg5643'#msg5643' date=125756132']
1. Copy all the files from the EHD to the MAC or any other drive/pc/hd.
2. Reformat the EHD to FAT32. I do want the flexibility to go back and forth from PC to MAC, vice versa. I won't be "copy-format-restore using the OS X native HFS+ filesystem"
3. Once format is done, then move everything back.

IS this correct?
[/quote]

Yes.
 
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