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Known Participant
October 22, 2025
Question

Actions from windows to mac

  • October 22, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 94 views

I have copied my actions from windows machine to mac mini OS Sequoia 15.6  However when I try to run an action this is the message I recieved

Could not complete the command because actions that reference files can only be played on the same platform on which they were recorded.

 

Suggestions would be very appreciated.

Ray

2 replies

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 22, 2025

Stephen is probably right. For example, if an action on Windows was recorded referencing a file found at an absolute path like…

C:\Users\[username]\Pictures\graphics

 

…that path must fail on a Mac for many reasons related to macOS using Unix-style paths instead, such as:

macOS doesn’t need drive letters, so a Mac path never starts with one. 

macOS paths don’t use the colon, in fact it’s an illegal character in paths. 

macOS uses forward slashes for directory hierarchies in paths, not backslashes.

 

The Mac version of that path would be

/Users/[username]/Pictures/graphics

 

To troubleshoot an action, inspect its steps in the Actions panel and find a step that looks down a path. You don’t need to re-record the entire action, you only need to re-record the step with the path problem and point it to where the same file is on your Mac now, then it should run properly.

Known Participant
October 29, 2025
Thanks for the help. The advice is close to the problem. The action
involved taking a file from a drive labeled by the windows machine. The
drive has a new name when connected to the Mac.

Thanks
Ray
Stephen Marsh
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 22, 2025

It's probably a paltform specific absolute save or open path.

 

Please post a screenshot of the action panel expanded with all steps visible and the panel wide enough to view details for one of the actions that has this error.