# Some photos cannot be moved from one folder to another in lightroom.



## martyna320 (May 9, 2013)

The heading basically says the problem. It is not 100% of the time but recently nearly that so I know I am doing it correctly. Once I have sorted my images filtered by flagging I then in library mode move these into another folder, sometimes an existing one sometimes a new one. However I keep getting the message that the following photos cannot be moved (they cannot be copied) the list is all the images that i have tried to move.

In addition i cannot delete some photos off the disk because"they are on a volume that does not support trash"


Thanks


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## clee01l (May 9, 2013)

Welcome to our forum.  There are two reasons (possibly others) that would cause LR to display this message when trying to drag and drop photos from one folder to another.  One is that the folder permissions do not allow 'write' so no new files can be added.  The other is that images with that file name already exist in that destination. 

To check permissions, got to finder and find the folder in question and right click and choose "Get Info" to open the dialog which will show sharing and permissions section.  Some reasons the you might not have permissions:  The drive could have been formatted for a Windows computer and the NTFS filesystem was used.  OSX can read but not write to NTFS hard drives. The Other Windows filesystem format is exFAT.  
The second reason could be that the image file names are on files in that folder but not cataloged.  If not cataloged by LR, they will not show up in the Library module and will not appear if the folder is selected for grid view. 

You can delete files on a disk that does not support trash.  You just need to confirm to OSX that you are aware of the consequences.  Disks that do not support trash are NTFS formatted HDs and Network drives on a file server that are not controlled by OSX. With no trashcan, any files on these drives that are deleted are not recoverable.


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## martyna320 (May 10, 2013)

Thanks for the reply but unfortunately the options you have given are not the cause. The drive is an original 3TB (the faster version - forgot the name ) so should be formatted correctly. the information was originally on a windows drive but has been transferred. Additionally it does not happen every time which you would expect to happen if it was a formatting issue wouldn't you? The files are attributed to a windows programme which can be run using parallels but I would expect that to be the case for all the photos.
The images are not already in the destination folder either I am 100% sure of this and the same problem occurs when creating a new folder anyway when of course it is impossible for anything to be in the folder.

Regarding the deleting, I get the confirmation message but it fails after agreeing giving the error message I mentioned in the original post and of course as already mentioned the drive is the original 3TB supplied with the mac.

Thanks


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## clee01l (May 10, 2013)

I do have a vague recollection of this as an intermittent issue on OSX, I do not recall a solution or if there was one. 
If you open the DiskUtilities app, you can click on "Repair permissions" and OSX will make sure all of the permissions are right for that drive. I've had to do this a couple of times after software updates to restore permissions that were lost.  No guarantees that this will fix your problem, but it can certainly do no harm.


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## Allan Olesen (Jul 7, 2013)

Edit 
Delete 




Allan Olesen 12 minutes ago 
   I have a somewhat similar issue. 

In Lightroom, I move folders from a local drive to a network drive.  After each folder is moved, Lightroom comes up with a dialog saying that  some files could not be moved. 

Every time it was all the non-raw files which could not be moved: .JPG,  .XMP and any other files in that folder. The raw files were moved ok. 

When I look at the destination folder, all files are there, and they  have been removed from the source folder. But sometimes, the .JPGs  appears corrupted, though I haven't yet looked into this further. 

If I move the folders using Windows Explorer, there are no problems. To  be sure, I have even created md5 checksums for all the files before the  move and then checked them after the move. 

This is LR 5.0 64 bit on a Windows 7 PC.


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## Jim Wilde (Jul 7, 2013)

Allan, that sounds like an LR5 bug that has already been reported to Adobe.....basically it looks as though Lightroom trips up on any files in the folder being moved that aren't actually recorded in the catalog, such as XMP or any other loose files. It does actually move them, but reports an error to the effect that those files could not be found. Because of the error report, it then aborts the move.....but at that stage the only remaining action to complete is the delete of the source folder. So the consequence of the drag and drop is that the original folder remain in the Folders Panel with a zero photo count and has to be manually removed.

However, if you are seeing corruption as well then that's an added dimension which most definitely needs to be reported. So can you confirm that?


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## Allan Olesen (Jul 7, 2013)

Good to know that this has been reported. I will wait for a fix and move files in Windows Explorer until then.



Jim Wilde said:


> However, if you are seeing corruption as well then that's an added dimension which most definitely needs to be reported. So can you confirm that?


No, I can deny it. It was a false alarm. I have just compared md5 checksums from before and after the move. There is no difference.

The apparent corruption seems to be caused by a temporary file locking/unavailability issue, or something equal to that. When I double click on the JPG a second time, I can open it without problems. 

(I have a suspicion that Windows 7 is interfering. I have earlier had great trouble moving folders with photos in Windows Explorer if I had browsed the contents of the folder immediately before. Apparently, this initiates a thumbnail creation which locks the files so they can't be moved until the thumbnail creation has ended. So I generally am a bit suspicious to Windows 7's handling of photo files.)


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## Maree (Jan 3, 2017)

clee01l said:


> Welcome to our forum.  There are two reasons (possibly others) that would cause LR to display this message when trying to drag and drop photos from one folder to another.  One is that the folder permissions do not allow 'write' so no new files can be added.  The other is that images with that file name already exist in that destination.
> 
> To check permissions, got to finder and find the folder in question and right click and choose "Get Info" to open the dialog which will show sharing and permissions section.  Some reasons the you might not have permissions:  The drive could have been formatted for a Windows computer and the NTFS filesystem was used.  OSX can read but not write to NTFS hard drives. The Other Windows filesystem format is exFAT.
> The second reason could be that the image file names are on files in that folder but not cataloged.  If not cataloged by LR, they will not show up in the Library module and will not appear if the folder is selected for grid view.
> ...





clee01l said:


> Welcome to our forum.  There are two reasons (possibly others) that would cause LR to display this message when trying to drag and drop photos from one folder to another.  One is that the folder permissions do not allow 'write' so no new files can be added.  The other is that images with that file name already exist in that destination.
> 
> Thanks for this Cletus, this solved my issue with my new Hard drive. I had to untick ignore ownership at the bottom of the info box.


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## clee01l (Jan 3, 2017)

Welcome to the forum Maree. I am glad to see that you made good use of the search capabilities of our forum.


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