Seagate Barracuda 500Gb external hard drive

Having paid £700 to have 6 years worth of photos recovered from my crashed La Cie hard drive, the data has been supplied on a Seagate Barracuda 500Gb external hard drive. I've plugged this in (via USB3), and tried to open the photo folders as I used to with the La Cie drive (using iPhoto Librarian, then selecting one of the backed-up folders) I get the following response: 'The iPhoto Library folder is locked, on a locked disk, or you do not have permission to make changes to it.'
As yet, I haven't been able to view any of the photos on the disk.

I'm using OS X 10.5.8, iPhoto Librarian and the external disk is shown on the desktop merely as '385108'.

Any help appreciated - please target at the lowest computer-gimp level! Many thanks

I would speak to the recovery company first and foremost. I suspect, to protect the recovered data, it's been rendered read-only.

Have done - 'there may be a problem with the formatting - nobody told us it was for a Mac'.

Have since managed to view some of the photos, by digging down into each Roll folder within the iPhoto library files, so I'm reassured that the photos are there. Seems there is a problem using the iPhoto Librarian programme to open each saved library - I'm beginning to think that this may not be the best method of storing and accessing vast amounts of photos - any better suggestions? And how can I extract all of the 3.8Gb of photos recovered onto this hard drive?

Many thanks for reply.

I wonder if they formatted the drive NTFS? OSX can read but not write to that.

That's a pretty dissapointing response from such an expensive service. But I think Dennis has hit the nail on the head.

As OSX can't natively write, only read from an NTFS formatted disk they are effectively read only.

You have a couple of options:
3.8gb isn't that big, you could copy the library files onto your Mac and then open them
Or
You could buy the $20 Paragon NTFS app which allows OSX to read AND write to NTFS disks

That makes a lot of sense. The company did offer to re-format the drive, so may well take them up on that - especially when I think about the price! I'm just a bit nervous of sending this data (all of our baby photos plus) away again having only just had them recovered...

Thanks for your time.

3.8gb isn't that much. Whichever path you go down copy your files to your Mac. Copy them to DVD. Copy them to an online service.

With irreplaceable data like that you can't have too many backups