Q: iPhoto Library & Aperture Library on portable hard drive
Since downloading El Capitan to my MacBook Pro I can't access my iPhoto or Aperture Libraries held on my portable 1 terabyte Seagate hard drive.
I can look at everything on the Seagate disk using 'Finder' so it's not locked.
I can see my iPhoto Library and Aperture Library but when I double click on them to pull them up, as I used to do when I was on Yosemite, I get this:
I have used the Option key in iPhoto to change to the library I want (see below), then I'm back at above!!!
I'm going round in circles. The Seagate can't be locked as I can access everything else on it. Can anyone help, please?
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)
Posted on Nov 1, 2015 9:00 AM
The setup with the Seagate is working for single files and documents, but Apple's photo libraries are packages of linked files and the references in the internal database files require MacOS Extended (Journaled) to work reliably. With a different file system the filenames or pathnames may become ambigious. Earlier versions of MacOS X did not check the file system, when you opened an Aperture Library or an iPhoto Library on an incompatible drive. That usually ended up with a library corruption and copy errors when trying to move the libraries between drives. So the most recent versions of Aperture and iPhoto are checking the filesystem, before they open the library.
If you try to open an Aperture Library or an iPhoto Library on a volume with an incompatible filesystem in the new Photos.app, you will have the added complication, that Photos cannot create hard links on the disk and will create a migrated library on your system drive instead and probably run out of storage.
Posted on Nov 2, 2015 1:00 AM






