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Import Using Catalog on external drive

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BillieMercer

Billie
Premium Cloud Member
Joined
Apr 14, 2019
Messages
12
Location
San Miguel de Allende, GTO, MX
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Cloud Service
Lightroom Version Number
LR Classic 9.2
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.14 Mojave
I have a large external drive with my photos and catalog (also backup in second location on my PC) I am currently living in a different place and I have bought a MacBook Pro. When I try to open LR with the catalog on the external drive, I get this message.
Lightroom cannot open the catalog named LR5-2-2-2 located on volume "MASTER" because Lightroom cannot save changes to this location.

Is there a way to use this catalog on the MacBook Pro laptop and also on the PC?
 
Your external drive may have been formatted in the PC such that it is not writable by MAC systems.
Windows drives are commonly NTFS or FAT32.
ExFAT is the format required to be readable in both systems.
Do NOT re-format this drive until you have a full backup as a format will wipe all data.
Much info out on the web about Mac formats- eg.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/mac-file-system-external-drive/
 
Your external drive may have been formatted in the PC such that it is not writable by MAC systems.
Windows drives are commonly NTFS or FAT32.
ExFAT is the format required to be readable in both systems.
Do NOT re-format this drive until you have a full backup as a format will wipe all data.
Much info out on the web about Mac formats- eg.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/mac-file-system-external-drive/

Grrrr..... I was afraid that was the problem. Okay, If I back up to another HD, should that HD be formatted as ExFat? Should I copy both the Library image files and the catalog directly to the ExFAT new external HD format?

Although I don’t like the answer, I really appreciate you answering my question.
 
If I back up to another HD, should that HD be formatted as ExFat?
Should I copy both the Library image files and the catalog directly to the ExFAT new external HD format?
I am a Windows guy so if Mac users have better answers please chime in.
To the first question- If the drive is to be Read/write in both Mac and PC, then- Yes, ExFat.
To the second- Yes, copy everything! Basically you are making a 'mirror' copy on a Mac 'workable' drive.
 
Grrrr..... I was afraid that was the problem. Okay, If I back up to another HD, should that HD be formatted as ExFat? Should I copy both the Library image files and the catalog directly to the ExFAT new external HD format?

Although I don’t like the answer, I really appreciate you answering my question.
It depends on which machine does the formatting. If you are doing this on the windows machine the it does not matter which filesystem is used for the target (backup) volume. What is important is that your volume that will be used by both Windows and MacOS is formatted exFAT or FAT32 (On the Mac, FAT32 is called (MS-DOS FAT) and all data on it will be erased prior to formatting as exFAT or FAT32. Macs can only read/write to APFS, HFS, MS-DOS FAT, and exFAT filesystems. If you had formatted this first volume with one of the Mac/Windows compatible filesystems, you would not have seen this issue. HPFS is a UAC secure filesystem used only by Microsoft. exFAT or FAT32 filesystems do not manage security and are universally R/W by Windows, Mac, LINUX, and the operating system used by your camera or your mobile device. This is why camera cards and thumb drives (formatted FAT32) can be used by a variety of operating systems.
 
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