Export as Catalog cannot write some image files to external location

[owlhuang]

Hi all Lr Classic users,

I hit a problem when exporting a folder as catalog to an external location.   The error message I got is "Lightroom was able to successfully export some of the photos to the new catalog, but encountered these problems." and "Photos could not be copied. (161)" in the following dialog window.

I have 320 image files in the original folder, and 161 out of 320 cannot be copied to the external location, which is a networking CIFS filesystem.  Looking into the resulting folder, the catalog file itself is created correctly.  But only 159 Canon CR2 files are copied and all other 161 JPG/HEIC/mp4/mov files are not copied.  To be exact, those non-CR2 files exist with a file size as zero.

If I export the same folder to a local destination, all 320 files are copied without any error message.  I could also copy the resulting folder to the above CIFS destination without any problem.  In fact, I am doing this as a workaround for now.

My system is a MacBook Pro running Lightroom Classic CC 8.1, with Camera Raw 11.1.  The CIFS destination is a Linux system running Samba service.  I could try to duplicate the issue from a Windows system later.

Also this looks like the same issue of the following old thread, which is not fixed but workaround-ed.

Export as CATALOG fails to export images, previews or thumbnails - why?

-Dennis

[owlhuang]

I can confirm that the exporting works just fine from Windows.  It only happens on a MacOS system.  Adding MacOS tag.  My MacBook is running MacOS Mojave, version 10.14.3.

[owlhuang]

I have more information on this issue by looking into the log file on server,

The error messages tell me that the error is because MacOS tries to write metadata file (._IMAGE.JPG) into the network location, but got denied.  I am guessing MacOS gives up writing the real IMAGE.JPG file after that, hence it has a size of zero.  I can also confirm that the catalog export works if the server accepts ._IMAGE.JPG metadata files.  But this is not a solution since the server blocks metadata to prevent MacOS pollutes the shares, which are also shared by Windows/Linux machines.

That also explains why .CR2 files are exported successfully, because MacOS doesn't understand that file type and no metadata is written into the network location.

Interesting, for some reasons, I didn't see any metadata files if MacOS exports to a Windows share.  Not sure why MacOS decides to do differently on different shares.

Is it possible for Lightroom to avoid the creation of the metadata file?

[owlhuang · Accepted solution]

I am marking this as answered since it is not a bug from Lightroom but more like MacOS requirement/limitation.  For people with similar problem, the best shot for now is to have all external sources accepting MacOS metadata files.