Hi, I am trying export photos from my Macs photo library to an external Seagate hard drive but it's not simple! I've tried opening the picture library and dragging the photos library to the external drive but it won't allow me to do this. I've also tried exporting but I get the following message "could not write file to destination (1001)"
Can someone tell me in simple terms how to do this please?
Thanks!
MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.12
Yes, that would solve the problem, but unless it's pre-formatted for the Mac you'd still need to format it. But don't worry that's really easy. Just bring up the Disk Utility app (using Spotlight search, for example from the magnifying glass on the top-right corner), select the new drive in the list, and click the "Erase" button. The default will already be selected as "Mac OS Extended (journaled)" most likely. Here is an official guide:
How to erase a disk for Mac - Apple Support
If you have plenty of space on your current NTFS formatted external drive, it's fairly easy to split it be allocating some of the current free space as a new second partition that can then be formatted. Here is the guide for that:
Partition a physical disk using Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
Yes, that would solve the problem, but unless it's pre-formatted for the Mac you'd still need to format it. But don't worry that's really easy. Just bring up the Disk Utility app (using Spotlight search, for example from the magnifying glass on the top-right corner), select the new drive in the list, and click the "Erase" button. The default will already be selected as "Mac OS Extended (journaled)" most likely. Here is an official guide:
How to erase a disk for Mac - Apple Support
If you have plenty of space on your current NTFS formatted external drive, it's fairly easy to split it be allocating some of the current free space as a new second partition that can then be formatted. Here is the guide for that:
Partition a physical disk using Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
It sounds like you are using a Windows-formatted NTFS drive (partition) which the Mac cannot write to.
You really would need to have the external drive partition formatted for the Mac (Mac OS Extended (journaled) format) in order to copy your Photos library folder there. If you have other data on there that you care about, obviously formatting it is not an option. If you only have some data you could copy it to your Mac first, then erase the drive, then re-copy your data back onto there along with your photos library.
If the drive has tons of free space you could partition into two parts, an NTFS partition for Windows and a Mac partition for Mac data (like photos library). Although some people would point out you can reformat it into a common format like ExFat that both Windows and Mac can handle, for photo libraries I would not recommend that. It'd be better to chop the drive in half if it's big enough.
Thanks, I think I understand this. I'm not sure I will know how to split the drive as I'm a complete technophobe! If I bought another hard drive and used that purely for Mac photos would that solve the problem?
is the drive format as ntfs?
Copying photos to external hard drive
