Newbie with Mac/Windows OS and RAW file problems

[sandie]

I have had a unique problem. I shoot in raw and use PSE 12 mostly but do have LR and DxO Pro as well to help PP. Here is the problem.

I switched from Windows to iMac about a year ago and found it hard to get used to for my photography but lately I have put a fire under my butt and have been doing a lot of shooting. I downloaded a card to the PHOTOS on iMAC and then tried to drag photos to the EXT HDD and they bounced back but now are THUMBNAILS I am not sure that the bouncing back had anything to do with it. Turns out the ext HDD was formatted for Windows and not Apple so that is why it was read only and wonder if it had to do with the Thumbnails happening.

The good news is that the iMAC was connected to the lap top which is a Mac Pro through the cloud so the originals are saved on laptop but this has occurred twice now.

I have had the ext HDD cleaned, formatted and then photos put back on so I have those - but the ones I was trying to save and bounced did not save to HDD and saved back to the computer as thumbnails.

HELP - Now afraid to try to save any photos to the computer.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Sandie,

You added this question to an old thread which was confusing, so I have moved it to its own thread and also paragraphed your block of text to make it more readable.

I'm not a MAC person, so will defer answering to someone with experience ...

... although (if you can on a Mac), you might want to look at the 'thumbnail' file properties;
Do the file name extensions end with ".jpg" or something else?
What file size are thumbnails? (in kB or MB)

This might give us a clue whether you've really done any damage to the files.

If you're lucky, it may just be that the Mac is displaying them as thumbnails because it doesn't know any better. Unfortunately, nor do I, or I would advise in more detail how to achieve what I suggested above.

Hope that helps, Dave

PS Pardon my bad manners - welcome to the CiC forums from me

[inkista]

Windows uses the NTFS for formatting hard drives.
OSX uses HFS (usually journaled) for formatting hard drives.
Linux uses EXT3.

All of these formats are more or less mutually exclusive of each other. Most OSes can read all three, but can only write to one that's native to the OS. So reformatting the HDD probably didn't do anything if you reformatted it as NTFS. You have to reformat it as HFS (Journaled) on your Macintosh with the Disk Utility for it to be read/writable from a Mac, but then it won't be writeable from a Windows box.

You can install software and drivers on each particular box to handle one format or another, or do some command line hacking on your fstab file to mount the drive as NTFS (but honestly, if you're not a UNIX/Linux geek, this may not be something you want to mess with and from the comments on that post it looks like the results are... variable), but possibly the best bet, if you have to share a lot of photos between multiple operating systems is to simply format the HDD you're using to store/transfer your photos as FAT or exFAT. This format is universally read/write for all three OSes (it's how USB thumb drives and camera memory cards are formatted). Use exFAT if you anticipate having files that are larger than 4GB.

Does that answer your question? I'm not exactly clear on what you mean by "bounced back" or how you had the hard drive "cleaned" in your question, so I'm just kind of taking a wild guess.

Are you using the OSX Disk Utility to format the drive?

[Colin1957]

Sandie,
I can't claim to be anything near an expert on handling photos on computers but I do have over 25,000 RAW and processed JPG files safely stored on external hard drives connected to my iMac. To be precise I have all of this running in triplicate on 3 external HDDs as I'm determined never to lose my photos! The external HDDs are HFS formatted (x2) and NTFS formatted (x1) the latter fully usable by the iMac. To achieve this I run a Paragon driver on the iMac which I got from Seagate (the HDD manufacturer) when I bought a number of their hard drives (check the Seagate website for a download).

You shoot in RAW and post process (I too have both Lightroom and DxO Optics Pro) - so I would suggest keeping your originals away from the Photos app on the Mac, until you have them in final format (for me that's JPG) for viewing. I shoot with Nikon cameras so I use their simple non-destructive RAW software View NX2 to transfer my RAW files from camera to an external hard drive linked to my iMac. Other camera manufacturers have their own simple but effective RAW compatible software. I then view the images and delete non-keepers using View NX2. Next I import the 'keeper' RAW files into Lightroom, leaving them in their original location (rather than making a copy). After post processing I export JPGs from Lightroom to the same external hard drive. Only then do I use the Photos app on my iMac, allowing it to copy the JPGs onto the internal hard drive of my iMac to add to my Photos library for viewing purposes.

Hope this helps.
Colin

[Clactonian]

I have used a Mac now for a few years and to be honest have always steered well clear of iPhoto and now Photos. The problem being that in comparison to most other programs they seem to have a mind of their own, being too automated. I'm probably doing both programs an injustice but for me there are better programs out there, such as Lightroom which you already use.
I don't even automate the upload process from a card. I open a finder window, create a new folder named to my liking under a 'My Picture' general folder (my actual filing system is a little more complicated than that but is irrelevant for the moment) then open a second Finder widow, navigate to the images on the card, and drag them across to the newly formed folder in the other window. I then know exactly where they are! I then import them into my Lightroom catalogue being careful to select the 'leave photos where they are' option. Any subsequent edits are contained within a 'sidecar' folder attached to the original image in the original folder. Yes, it probably has more steps than the workflow used by others, but I haven't lost an image yet.
All my images are backed up to an external drive.

[billtils]

I downloaded a card to the PHOTOS on iMAC and then tried to drag photos to the EXT HDD

I am probably missing something somewhere along the line, but if you downloaded a card to Photos then your original images will be there, and if you want to put them somewhere else all you have to do is use the export function.

As far as all the other posts go, I'd be in broad agreement. I was an Aperture user for many years and when Apple dumped it they left me with an app that I did not want and have avoided like the plague (other than to take the steps required to prevent it deciding it was the default for opening photographs). There are many photo editing / library programs available - why not just settle on one of those and open your card from within it?

[Colin1957]

Sandie,
I'm not sure how familiar you are with the way the Mac Photos app deals with (i.e. stores) photos - you may know all of this already - but here goes anyway in case this helps...........

The Photos app operates using a library, like iTunes. When it imports photos it's not immediately obvious where they've been stored. In fact they're buried inside the Photos library; to find them you do the following.........

Just a warning on the following - don't disturb the folder or file structures in the Photos library - if you want to move your image files elsewhere I suggest that you copy them from the library and paste them where you want them (see step 6 below)

1. Open Finder and navigate to the Pictures folder on your hard drive.
2. Locate your Photos library folder - it has an icon like the Photos app and the file extension .photoslibrary.
3. Right click on the Photos library folder and select 'Show Package Contents'
4. Now you will see a whole host of folders, including one called Masters which is where your image files are stored by the Photos app
5. You'll find as you drill down into the folder structure that things are arranged by year, then months in subfolders then days in a further subfolder then finally the folders containing images. These latter folders are labelled as the precise time of the import e.g. 20151212-092245 is my latest one.
6. If you wish to recover your image files and store them in another location then select the files, copy them and finally paste in the new location rather than moving the originals from the library.
7. If ultimately you decide not to use the Photos app and want to delete the copy of your photo stored in the Photos library then always delete your images from within the app itself and not directly from Finder.

Hope this helps,
Colin

[Brev00]

Dragging photos is the problem. When I drag a high quality image or set of images from Photos, all I get is a thumbnail size copy in my ehd. Same as you. So, instead, I select one image from a set to be copied, then go to edit and select all. Then, I select file, export, export originals. Photos then asks for the destination. I choose the intended hard drive, then export the batch. My files stay in Photos as they were and I have a copy in my hard drive. Photos is a good home base for finished jpegs but I keep my raws elsewhere and entirely external after processing.