As far as I understand, Apple wants to radically reduce users ability to use programs that allow Mac users to work with NTFS-formatted external drives. In my case, after installing Ventura, I suddenly experienced an inexplicable explosion of errors and slowdowns and crashes as a result of the inability of my computer to interact as usual with all of the data I keep on externals.
It took many dozens of hours of investigations (Yes, I am an idiot) to figure out what exactly was going on. Apparently all the externals I use are dual-formatted for both pc and mac, and have functioned just fine thanks to a program that came bundled with them called Paragon NTFS for Mac. This progran was rendered non-functional by the OS upgrade, and so I can became unable to write to externals, and programs like Bridge suddenly became unable to read any of my external data. The suggested work around proposed by Paragon, which supposedly has compatibility with Ventura, was to open the preferences panel and make a number of changes, including complete and tricky un-installation of existing Paragon program and installation of a new version. Unfortunately if you've upgraded to ventura you will not be able to open the program at all or view the preferences panel. Paragon customer support is useless and non-responsive. Eventually I tried a regular uninstall and purchased a new NTFS-for-max program, this one by Tuxera. Tuxera brags of being able to deal with Ventura, but upon installation I found a lot of problems. It does allow me to write to externals, barely - saving one photo to an external drive can cause a hang of 2 to 3 minutes. It does allow me to use Bridge, barely - opening a folder of images from a single photoshoot can take 3-5 minutes or more. Not sure what the work arounds are for this. It's simply not a viable way to live. A mac tech advised me that iBoysoft NTFS for Mac might provide faster speeds.
I've called Apple support but they advise me, more or less, that I have done all that is possible to do and that it is unfortunately working as Apple intended. He suggested I purchase a lot of expensive new MAC only drives
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