Using Digital Photo Pro for Mac with Photos on an External Drive

[olyduck]

About a year ago, I installed DPP onto my Mac.  The program opened just fine and the file menu could "see" my Mac's my external drive where my Photos Library was located, but was UNABLE to display thumbnails or allow me to open an image.  At the time, a Canon rep told me that DPP was not designed to work with a Photos Library on an external drive.  I found this hard to believe, given how many folks keep their photos on external drives.

Has anything changed in this regard with newer versions of DPP?

Thanks,

David

[johnrmoyer]

I am able to change those settings in the settings menus. If you cannot and need different settings and depending upon which mac hardware you have, another way to get access to those settings sometimes is to delete the app, download the app again, and install the app again. I suggest trying the settings menu first and see if that gets you what you want. It may be necessary to type in a password to change the settings.

settings -> privacy and security -> files and folders -> Digital Photo professional
has enabled on my computer "Desktop Folder", "Documents Folder", "Downloads Folder", "Network Volumes", and "Removable Volumes". I do not have full disk access enabled for DPP.

[javiergonzales]

I kept my Photos Library on a drive to save space, but DPP couldn't open the images or show thumbnails either. I reached out to Canon, and like you mentioned, they told me it wasn't designed for that setup. I found it odd, too, since many people store their photos on external drives for better organization. For what it's worth, I ended up using my Nixplay digital picture frame to showcase some of my favorite photos from the external drive. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it worked for enjoying my pictures in a more visual way.

[johnrmoyer]

---

@javiergonzales wrote:

kept my Photos Library on a drive to save space, but DPP couldn't open the images or show thumbnails either. I reached out to Canon, and like you mentioned, they told me it wasn't designed for that setup. I found it odd, too, since many people store their photos on external drives for better organization.

---

I do not know what software you have used to put photos into a Photo Library, but it will likely be necessary to that same software to export those photos from that library before they can be edited by another program.

I  do not put my photos into a "library" but keep them as ordinary files. If in a library, I would need to use the software that created or understands the library to export the photos as ordinary files so that I could edit them with other programs.

Apple Photos creates one sort of library, darktable another, and software from Adobe yet another.

On macOS, I use ksh as my login shell because that is what I have been using on various Unix systems since 1987, so my methods might not be useful to those who do not use command lines in a terminal. On macOS, in finder one may Ctrl-click on an ordinary photo file and choose "Open With->Other->Canon Utilities->Digital Photo Professional 4->Digital Photo Professional 4.app" and DPP will open the file if the file is one that was created by a Canon camera or by Canon software.