migrating photos from external hard drive to macbook pro

How is your external drive formatted? There may be a permissions problem with the files on the drive so the photos cannot be imported.

Select your drive in the Finder and press the key combination ⌘I (for File > Get Info). In the Info panel enable the "Ignore ownership on this volume" flag.

When you try to import a folder with photos from your external drive you should be able to see something similar to this:

In the sidebar you should be seeing an "Import" section with the name of your drive or folder showing. It will list the number of new photos. You select the photos you want to import and press "Import selected" or Import all new photos.

Photos may need a very long time to populate this screen. Photos in an incompatible format will not show at all, for example, RAW files that are not supported.

Thank you for the response. I have followed your clear and detailed instructions and when I open the hard drive preferences under sharing and permissions it says read only and does not provide me the option to check off that box.

Then the drive you are using has a filesystem where it is not possible to enable that option.

Could you try to import smaller subsets of your photos, folder by folder? Copy some folders from your external drive to your Pictures folder and then use the command "File > Import" in Photos to import the folders from your Pictures folder. This way you can check if the file system on your external drive is causing the problems or the image format of the photos you are trying to import.

That's great! You're welcome 🙂