Can’t get write permission on external hard drive when exporting from Lightroom

external-diskhard drivepermissionphotos

A few days ago I bought a new 2018 MacBook Pro which is running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6. I have been a Windows user till then.

After I edited my photos on the new Mac in Lightroom, I plugged in my external drive (WD My Passport) and I went on to export them. In Lightroom I got an error that said I can't export on that drive since it has only read privileges or something like that. So I went on to googling the issue and found out that I have to change the permission. I tried that but the next obstacle was that the Apply to enclosed items option is greyed out.

I googled that problem but i haven't found a solution so far. Is this problem happening because I have to reformat my external drive on something other that NTFS? Or is there a setting i missed? Or something completely different.

Best Answer

macOS doesn't natively contain the software (drive) to write onto a disk formatted with NTFS (but it can read NTFS formatted drives fine). That's what the error is implying that only read privileges are available.

A drive formatted with NTFS can be written to by installing NTFS driver software in macOS. For writing to external disks made by WD, you will need to install a proprietary NTFS driver for macOS provided by the disk manufacturer called Paragon NTFS Driver for Mac.

You can follow the instructions in this support article on WD website, How to Install the Paragon NTFS Driver for Mac, to install the software and gain the ability to write files to the disk.