Help needed to back up NEF images to My Passport

Hi, I think I need some help. I’m just trying to back up images from Photos on my Mac to My Passport and I’m getting error messages for .NEF file names, and they won’t back up. Everything else seems fine. I may have missed something - can anyone give me some help on this please?

Hi scotty26,

There may be some file format issues due to which it may be not supported by backup software. Can you provide some details:
Which backup software are you using for backup?
Did you check after changing the file format of this raw image format of Nikon into jpg or jpeg?

is your passport the time machine device?

Hi, thanks for replying. I first ran a time machine backup for all data on the Mac and that seemed to work fine but it was 500gb and so I thought it would be easier to access my photos if I needed to by saving them separately to folders I created on the external drive. So I encountered the problem when dragging and dropping photos.

What I’ll do now you’ve suggested it, is find out how to do a batch change of the NEF images to JPEGs. If I can do that I think they’ll be recognised.

I’m not sure why the NEF images appeared to be saved in the time machine backup but not when dragging and dropping… but if I can convert them to jpegs and save them that way it’ll be a good result.

I’m away for a few days but will post what happens when I get back. And thanks again for helping me out.

Hi, and thank you for getting back to me. Yes, I used time machine to back up all the data on my mac including my photos, and that seemed to work okay but it came to 500gb. So for something more manageable, I thought I would save my photos separately by dragging and dropping them to the external drive. That’s when I got the error messages about the NEF images.

I’ve had a suggestion that changing them to JPEGs should work, and I’m going to look at how to do a batch change on the file names if I can but there may be other ways around this or I might just be doing something wrong and am grateful for your advice.