File Names....Windows vs Mac

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Not necessarily a photography question, but related in a way......Went to the left coast after Labor Day, every image file from my Nikons, when opened and viewed using my MacPro which was purchased this June, every file now has a ( ._ ) period underscore added as a prefix. Files with this prefix will not open using Windows. In addition, the prefix now creates a duplicate file that takes up storage on a flash drive or on my Samsung external SSD. Have not checked any of the videos yet, I presume the same thing will happen. An inconvenience and a big pain in the butt if I have to have separate storage for Windows and Mac!!! Also know that files with the prefix will not display on my Samsung 55" HD TV. Never had an issue viewing trip pics on my TV before this. This is also reason NOT to check pics on the SD or XQD cards with the Mac. Anyone know why this is happening???? Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.......................
 
Not necessarily a photography question, but related in a way......Went to the left coast after Labor Day, every image file from my Nikons, when opened and viewed using my MacPro which was purchased this June, every file now has a ( ._ ) period underscore added as a prefix. Files with this prefix will not open using Windows. In addition, the prefix now creates a duplicate file that takes up storage on a flash drive or on my Samsung external SSD. Have not checked any of the videos yet, I presume the same thing will happen. An inconvenience and a big pain in the butt if I have to have separate storage for Windows and Mac!!! Also know that files with the prefix will not display on my Samsung 55" HD TV. Never had an issue viewing trip pics on my TV before this. This is also reason NOT to check pics on the SD or XQD cards with the Mac. Anyone know why this is happening???? Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.......................
Not sure about the '.' but a '_' is added to the front of a Nikon file name when you shoot in Adobe RGB instead of sRGB color space. Did you by any chance change the shooting color space of your camera?
 
Ok, so the ’.’ in front of the files is an unix marker for hidden files. If you would mount your drive on Linux or MacOS, they should be invisible. Windows does not follow this convention so they are visible under it.

now, the ._ files should be smaller than your regular files (which should also be there) and are not for opening but are something called a ‘resource fork’ , containing extra data about the file. This concept is Mac only afaik and should appear whenever you are working with exFat or FAT32 partitions.

Basically… the behavior is as expected, you shouldn’t lose any data (your files should also be there) but it is annoying if you are a cross platform user.

*iPadOS has the same behavior with an added benefit of corrupting exFat and FAT32 file systems
 
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