Unable to export photos onto external hard drive

[Rubi342546942j92]

Hi! I'm having some trouble with exporting my photos. I have been using Lightroom Classic and photoshop for years, I've been using my external hard drive to store all my files for the past year. I've never had any trouble exporting my photos directly onto the external. I recently switched from Windows to MacOS, I edited on both photoshop and lightroom today, I finished my edits and went to export but on both programs it just says that it is un-writeable. I am able to export onto my computers hard drive but not the external. I also am not able to move my photos from downloads to the external. I use only the external hard drive for photo storage, how can I save my photos to the external?? 

I tried adding both programs to accessibility and such, it forced me to delete all my edits on photoshop so that it could restart, but it still is not saving after restarting the program. 

how do I fix this???

[Jim Wilde]

Is the external drive the same one that you used on Windows? If so, what format is the external drive? 

[Rubi342546942j92]

Yes it's the same external drive that I used with windows. I'm not sure what the format is, how would I check that?

[Jim Wilde]

Using the Finder app, right-click on the volume and choose "Get Info", which will list various things about the drive, including its format.

[Rubi342546942j92]

Thanks! It's formatted as NTFS, I think I that's probably the issue! Would I just have to clear the hard drive, switch formats, and then put the files back on it?

[Jim Wilde]

That's one way of doing it. Alternatively get a new external drive (wouldn't you have to get one anyway to do the copy from the NTFS volume?), make sure it's formatted correctly, copy the files to it from the NTFS volume (making sure to copy the exact same folder structure), then point LrC to that new drive.

What format you choose to format the new drive depends whether you think you'll be moving the drive between the Mac and Windows....if you do, you'll need to format it as ExFat. If it's going to be Mac-only use HFS+ (mechanical drives) or AFPS (SSD-type drives).