Photos dragged into external drive are showing up as a zero alias

Hi

Seems to be a bug in 11.5. If the drive is not APFS or MacOS extended, you can't export to it.

The workaround is to export to a folder on your desktop, and then copy from there to the external drive.

if you want to give feedback to apple, the best channel is:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html

They are more likely to do something if a lot of people request the same.

If you are trying to archive photos on the external drive by dragging them to the drive, it is not a good idea anyway, because you are only saving the preview when you drag a photo fromPhotos. The preview might be the high resolution original, but it is not guaranteed. You have no control over the quality of the saved photos. "File > Export > Export ... Photos" is the only way to control the quality of the saved photos. With the Export dialog you can specify the format, the pixel size, and the amount of the compression. Dragging the photos is just for sharing low resolution photos to show them to someone.

raygeem wrote:

as a follow up, I still have to go thru a desktop folder to the drive

to get them to show up as anything other than zero k

That is unfortunately the macOS 11.5 bug mentioned by Tony. If you need a file system format on your external drive, that is compatible with Linux or Windows, you could partition the drive - one partition with macOS Extended (Journaled) or APFS as recommended by Matti Haveri, the other exFAT.

I'd reformat external data disks to APFS (SSD) or MacOS Extended, Journaled (HDD) unless cross-platform file transfer to Windows or Linux is needed via exFAT (GUID).