Old Mac OS vs New Camera RAW Format

Finally I hit the brick wall of old vs new. My ten-year-old 2013 Mac Pro laptop can only be updated to Mac OS 10.15 Catalina. At purchase, the laptop ran Mac OS 10.9 known as Mavericks. So it is stuck well below the newer versions of Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura and, currently, Sonoma. 

Many of the applications I use on the laptop easily can save files to iCloud Drive to be opened on my newer Mac computer for final touchups. But this month I learned that NEF RAW images from my Nikon Zfc were not visible to any application including the Finder. 

Lesson #1 - When on a road trip with 2013 Mac Pro laptop, change Nikon settings to shoot RAW + JPEG. Then some images can be previewed, sorted and ranked - even shared. 

Lesson #2 - The Nikon Snapbridge iPhone app can come to the rescue and transfer a 2 megapixel, low resolution, image to iPhone or iPad for edits or sharing over an adhoc wifi connection. 

Lesson #3 - Consider budgeting for a new laptop after evaluating how an iPad Pro with USB-C port can power an SSD and the apps needed to edit Nikon's NEF files. Maybe begin budgeting for a new iPad Pro. 

SSD Failure Warning

It happened to me just last month. The on-screen warning popped up when I attached my Photo Vault external drive. And I have been putting off doing anything until I check my SSD backup drives. 

Message to you - Drive failures happen. Accidents happen. Fires happen. Build in backups to your backups. Keep an off-site backup of important digital (and analog) documents and images. 

Backstory - OK, back in 2015 I started using an external SSD (solid state drive) when using Lightroom for DSLR photo management. My image management process uses three Western Digital 2TB SSDs purchased at Costco. The primary drive is the one where new photos are added and photos are edited with apps on Mac. The second drive is also a 2TB SSD that stays in my home. The third 2TB SSD lives off-site and out-of-town. After downloading photos or a big editing session I use ChronoSync Express for macOS to manually sync the folders on the primary drive to the second drive. When visiting off-site, the primary drive travels with me along with a 2013 Mac Pro laptop and ChronoSync Express is used to sync the primary drive to the third drive. All of this in addition to a Time Machine backup of the Mac computer. 

Online Research - Reading Repair a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac has a line that jumped out at me: "If Disk Utility tells you the disk is about to fail, back up your data and replace the disk—you can’t repair it."  

I have been wanting to update the SSDs from USB3 to USB-C and will check at Costco for new drives in 2024. Now is the time to consider if 2TB is the best size going forward. In Summer 2021 I purchased a Nikon Zfc mirrorless camera. This retro device has the same size APS-C cropped sensor as my Nikon D7000 & D5000 cameras. RAW files are still about 25-29 MB in file size with 22 megapixels. This is the "right size" image for my camera work, and full-frame mirrorless gear was in my budget but not for easy carrying around. 

Another possibility is to buy new SSDs, copy the data to a primary drive and then retire the drive to a local safe deposit box. Ahh. Maybe a two-drive solution with one locked up and another around the house (for trips down memory lane). But I'm tempted to begin anew in 2024 -- storing new photos from Nikon and iPhone shoots with the same photo management process of three drives using new USB-C SSD drives.  Stay tuned.