I have RAW files on an external windows formatted drive which I have edited but where are the XMP files?

[Toby Keane Photography]

I have some old RAW files on an old windows formatted drive and I am trying to gather them together on my mac. I directly imported them to lightroom using the external-HD as the main storage/destination of the RAW files to start with and I have now made edits on these RAW files in LR but I now want to move the selected/edited images onto my macbook so I don't need to go back and plug in my external-HD. Problem is that lightroom won't let me move/copy the selected imported files off the external (I'm guessing because it is windows formatted).

I could manually go into my external-HD through finder and pick each image by looking at the filename and then copy it over on to my macbook HD and then sync over each image change but a.) this will take a long time to manually pick each one and sync settings (wedding photos) and b.) I can't work out where LR has put the XMP files for the images and don't want to loose the edits... It hasn't put them as a side car on the external-HD because it can't because it is windows formatted however it must be storing the changes somewhere because when I unplug and replug in the drive the changes have been saved. I have tried doing a 'filename'.xmp search on my entire macbook for the related sidecar file but nothing comes up.

Can anyone shed any light? I'm guessing the changes are probably held somewhere within the catalog file maybe?

Thanks, I appreciate this is a slightly complicated post so please ask if any clarification needed.

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

There probably are no .xmp files. The default operation of Lightroom is to NOT create xmp files.

So you don't need them. Lightroom works perfectly well without them. You don't lose edits because you don't have xmp files, the edits are in the catalog file.

To move files to the internal HD, you can follow the instructions in the section entitled "Part 2 — Updating Folder Location" of this document: Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders