How to create a file on Seagate Portable Drive for cloud video and photo transfer?

Martinonlyme wrote:

Hi Phil

Thank you for your kind reply. I did mean Folder, however when I did what you suggested, open the drive in finder, go to file menu and when I do New Folder is not bold its very faint and won't allow me to open one.

That suggests the drive is formatted in a way the Mac can't write to it, so cannot create a folder in it.

Was this drive used with a Windows PC? If so, it's likely formatted as NTFS which the Mac can't natively write to.

To see the format, you can click on the drive in Finder and then press the cmnd+i keys on your keyboard to bring up the drive details. It should have a "Format" entry there.

You can use Disk Utility to erase and re-format the drive into exFat or APFS so the Mac can write to it. Make sure you backup everything on the drive you may want to keep before erasing it.

click here ➜ Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

I have also tried to export photos / videos as you've suggested but this I cannot do either, they will be pasted saved.

Not entirely sure what you mean by "pasted saved". You can export the photos and they will be extracted from the photos app and saved individually.

If you want to save the entire Photo library as a single unit, then you need to format the drive as APFS (or HFS+) and move the Photos Library.photoslibrary file out from the Pictures folder in Finder to the external drive once its correctly formatted.

If by "file" you mean a folder, then just open the drive in Finder, go to the File Menu ➜ New Folder, then name it whatever you want. Hit enter when you're done.

Depending on what you mean by "my cloud", you could ostensibly just drag the folders onto the folder in the external drive or if using Apple's iCloud Photos service, you would have to export them from the Photos App by selecting them and choosing the Export option from the File menu in Photos. Once exported and saved onto the external drive, you can delete them from the Photos app, and they will in turn delete from iCloud.

If that is not what you mean, or you need more specific help, or you are using some other cloud service like One Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox etc.. please clarify what you mean by file and what cloud service these photos are in.