Trouble working with external hard drives

[Melanie21846425z2wc]

I am in the process of migrating my photo processing tasks in LR/PS from Windows to Mac. I have all my photos on external hard drives that I used previously with Windows. I can view these volumes and import files to Lightroom ok but cannot create subfolders, move or copy files, etc. For example, when I tried to create subfolders in LR for a folder of images that I had just imported, I got this message: The folder /Volumes/Seagate Backup Plus Drive 1/Photos_FromBlueSeagateSlim_2TB/Duke_inCourtyard_2016/In Progress could not be created on disk. This leads me to think there is some sort of file/device incompatibility issue with trying to write to the external drives. Please help!

[SeanMcCormack]

Mac and PC address drives differently and Mac doesn't write to certain PC formats. What format is the drive? 

[Melanie21846425z2wc]

Hi Sean, thank you for your reply though this is the first time I have seen it. In the meantime, I did some sleuthing and found out essentially what you are saying. The drive is formatted in windows in a format that Mac can read from but not write to. The literature suggested reformatting cross-operating system drives in exFAT but of course that means moving all files to a different drive then copying them back after reformat. Luckily, my investigations also revealed that Seagate offers free to their drive users a special program driver that you can install on macs that enable them to write to windows drives. Did that and it worked like a charm! Thanks again for replying! Melanie