Help! External Hard Drive Lightroom Catalogue not recognized on Mac desktop

[gspyropoulos]

Hi,

I just bought a Mac desktop. I downloaded Ligthroom CC and trying to open my External Hard Drive Lightroom Catalogue (that I have been using on my Windows Desktop and laptop). Once I try to open the catalogue the message below appears: 

"Lightroom cannot launch with this catalog. It is either on a network volume or on a volume on which Lightroom cannot save changes.

The catalog's location is /Volumes/George's External 5TB/George/George's Lightroom External 5TB/George's Lightroom External 5TB.lrcat."

Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Best, 

George

[dj_paige]

You need to make the drive writeable in your Mac operating system. OR move the catalog file to the internal drive of your Mac somewhere.

[gspyropoulos]

Thank you! That was very helpful!

[gary_sc]

Placing your images on your hard drive is the easiest because you already have "write" permissions on that drive, but this may not be the best place to put your images.

If you have very few images and do not expect to have all that many in the future you should be OK. As the images increase, you will eventually start using up all of your free space on your hard drive making it more difficult to run applications. They use the unused space to do many of their operations. By placing your images, which eventually consume a lot of space, on an external drive, that will not be an issue. It's also a good idea to get a significantly larger hard drive than you need because you will fill that drive in time.

I also recommend to get a 2nd drive of equal size so that you can backup Drive #1 to Drive #2 fairly often because, like it or not, drives fail. As long as you backup reasonably often, you will not be affected much at all.

[gspyropoulos]

Thank you!

[GoldingD]

Assuming your MACOS is Catalina, see:

https://nektony.com/duplicate-finder-free/folders-permission

Pay attention to the part on Files and Folders. Typically a problem caused by not clicking on yes when asked about  Removable Volumes.

[gspyropoulos]

Thank you!