Nobody else can read my flashdrives

[Bob1956]

I take a lot of photos and transfer them to flash drives that I share with co-workers. About two months ago, I got comments that nobody could read my flash drives anymore. Mostly PC’s but a few Apples. However if I copy these same jpg’s to a cd, everything is fine. My 2015 MacBook Pro with OS X 10.11.6 is the only machine I know of that can read my flash drives.

Did I engage some sort of encryption or protection without knowing how? If so, how do I turn it off?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Bob.

What's the File System you've used to format the flash drive with? Basically the File System is needed in order for the OS to be able to "communicate" (read/write) with the partition and what's stored in it. However, the default Mac OS X File System HFS+ is not supported by Windows. Try formatting the flash drive with the exFAT File System. It's natively supported by both Mac OS X and Windows. Here's how to do it: How to format an external hard drive in exFAT or FAT32. Note that even if this guide is for an external drive, the process is the same for flash drives as well, just follow the instructions for the appropriate OS.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD