Problem accessing pics transferred from Photos to ext HD

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Problem accessing pics transferred from Photos to ext HD

Hi,

I recently transferred a lot of pics from (my wife's profile) Photos on iMac to an ext HD. The transfer went fine and accessing the pics on the HD whilst logged in to my wife's profile is ok. If however I log on to my profile, I cannot access the same pics on the HD as I get a message saying that access is denied as I don't have permission to view.

This was the first time that I transferred to an ext HD from a Mac and the first time I've experienced such a problem. I have been used to Windows and have transferred pics to an ext HD many times and have been able to view them and do whatever from any other Windows machine irrespective of who is logged on at the time.

Appreciate any guidance on this matter as its doing my head in and many thanks in advance!

Amir

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Nov 13, 2015 10:12 PM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

194,743 points

Nov 13, 2015 11:15 PM in response to ak3333

I recently transferred a lot of pics from (my wife's profile) Photos on iMac to an ext HD.

How did you do that? Did you export the photos from Photos to the EHD, or did you move the Photos library to the external EHD?

If you want to use files and folders on an external HD from several user accounts without permission problems, enable the option "Ignore ownership on this volume" for the external drive. If you copied files t a drive while signed in from your wifes account, your wife is the owner of the files, and if the permissions are set that only the owner can access them you will not be able to read them.

The "Ignore Ownership" flag can be set from the "File > Get Info" panel. for the drive. Select the drive in the Finder and press the key combination ⌘I for "File > Get Info". Open the Sharing and Permissions section of the panel, click the padlock to be able to change the permissions.

Any drive you are using with Photos should be formatted "MacOS Extended (Journaled) and not for Windows. If your external HD has a differnet filesystem you should the documents and data to a different drie an dreformat the drive as described here for iPhoto: iPhoto: Sharing libraries among multiple users

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