A

Anonymous

Answered

Copying catalog from Windows 10 to OSX(Silicon) breaks the catalog

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
January 14, 2026
3 replies
463 views

Hello,

As the subject says. No matter how I copy the catalog+photos(via external SSD and opening there directly, copying from the external drive to the Mac Mini's internal drive and then opening, through direct network copy, opening directly through the network drive) a lot of my photos break. Some photos have exclamation marks and when I click on them, it says that I won't be able to make any edits, or when this doesn't happen, when I click on a photo in develop mode, it simply states "An unkown error occurred" and I cannot do anything with that photo. Some other photos are completely fine, retaining all my edits and history. I also tried creating a new catalog then import everything from the old one. Same result. This totally prevents me from moving my catalog from Windows to my Mac.

Lightroom version: 15.1 Camera Raw 18.1
Source PC: Win 10 Pro, Ryzen 5 7600X, Nvidia Geforce RTX 5070 Ti, 32 GB RAM
Target Mac: Mac Mini M4 Pro 2024, MacOs 15.3.1 (24D70) (brand new)
External SSD used: Kingston XS2000 (brand new)

Please advise. Thank you.

macOS

Correct answer dj_paige

Some people report that reverting back to LrC 15.0 or LrC 15.0.1 solved the problem. But I don't know if that will work for everyone.

dj_paige

Legend

Some photos have exclamation marks and when I click on them, it says that I won't be able to make any edits, or when this doesn't happen, when I click on a photo in develop mode, it simply states "An unkown error occurred"

Known problem, Adobe is investigating. https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-lightroom-has-encountered-problems-reading-this-photo-after-upgrade-to-v15/idc-p/15660924#M66179

A

Anonymous

Thank you. So I'm basically f....d until a bugfix is released? 😞

dj_paigeCorrect answer

Legend

Some people report that reverting back to LrC 15.0 or LrC 15.0.1 solved the problem. But I don't know if that will work for everyone.

J

jslsvg

Known Participant

He tenido problemas de este tipo cuando los archivos se encontraban dentro de carpetas con nombres con tilde. Por ejemplo si una carpeta de llamana "fotografías" en mac después no la encontraba y en windows sí funcionaba. Desde que renombre las carpetas a nombres sin tilde "fotos" no he vuelto a tener problemas cuando muevo un catálogo de windows a mac o viceversa.

Saludos, José Luis

https://stock.adobe.com/es/contributor/205079068/josevgluis

A

Anonymous

I tried it but unfortunately didn't work. Thanks anyways

B

Bill Sprague

Community Expert

I can't make your files display. I'm going on what you wrote and that isn't clear.

Can you break it into two parts. First, provide detail on how you are moving the catalog. From where exactly to where. Second, can you provide detail on the source and destination of the photos? Is the file structure on the new computer the exact match of the old computer?

A

Anonymous

I moved it 4 different ways. As explained in my OP.

I'm copying from Windows to Mac.

1, Copying the catalog and raw photos to an external SSD, them moving them to the Mac's internal drive

2, Copying to the external SSD and keeping them there and opening the catalog from the SSD directly

3, I set up a directory share between my Windows PC and my Mac. I copied the files through the network to the Mac internal storage.

4, I opened the catalog directly through the directory share(so essentially directly the windows catalog but on the Mac)

It cannot be an exact match as Windows uses NTFS filesystem while Mac uses APFS(if I'm not mistaken) so the root dir differs.(on Windows it's H:\ and on Mac it's /users/myuser/ However I tried to keep the directory structure the same. So one main directory for the RAW photos and all the small directories from each photoshoot. Same as on Windows. And when I opened the catalog on Mac, I right clicked the missing folders and selected "Find missing folder". And then it loaded all smart previews but then a lot of photos became broken.(excalamation mark/unknown error) Others loaded up just fine with all my edits and edit history. My presets are also working(I copied those as well)

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