Pics won't copy to external drive from MacBook Air

[lori5060]

I was trying to help my friend. She has a folder on her MacBook air filled with pictures. because iCloud was saying her account was getting full these pictures, she had copied all her pics from iPhone to nacbook air using image app.

She plugged in her external drive, selected the folder of pictures and tried to drag it to the external drive and it wouldn't copy. we also tried copy/paste!

I tried the same process at home on my own MacBook Pro and it worked just fine..

Her external drive is not formatted to do any back ups. She had previously copied a bunch of pictures from her windows computer to that hard drive.

Has anybody got any ideas what the problem could be?

 

[MacInWin]

What is the format of the external drive? You said it worked with Windows, so it cannot be in a Mac format as Windows cannot read Mac drives. I would bet that it is in NTFS, the format that works for Windows, but which a Mac cannot natively write to. A Mac can read NTFS, but not write. So she has a couple of options;

1. Copy off the data from the drive and format to something both Windows and Mac can read and write. That would probably best be ExFAT. Then after formatting the drive, copy back the data and then the Air should be able to write to it.
2. Get ParagonNTFS for the Air. It costs $20US. ParagonNTFS enables the Air (and all Macs, for that matter) to write to NTFS. Microsoft NTFS for Mac | Paragon Software

 

[chscag]

@Lori:

Moved your post here. It's not a subject for the lounge.

 

[lori5060]

thnx. never know where to post my questions.
the work on external drive pics worked just great.
it took some to do buy all is well.

 

[MacInWin]

So, Lori, how did you solve it? It's good to post the solution so that someone with the same issue can see how you solved it.

 

[lori5060]

I followed suggestion from MACWIN... thanks for the great suggestion.

I formatted the drive from nuts (window) to xfat3...(windows and Mac)