I have a support ticket open for this, but I figured I’d engage the community too, in case anyone has any ideas. (DXO support seems pretty slow to respond lately, to the point of fully ghosting me.)
When I put my FilmPack 7 license key in the FilmPack activation window in PhotoLab 8, I receive the message, “An error occurred while writing activation data to disk.”
PhotoLab is otherwise working normally, but I can’t access any of the FilmPack features (and I can’t even successfully run FilmPack as a standalone app, but that’s another kettle of fish. All of my problems started with Sequoia, and in the beginning I was patient, because I know it can be a process to make everything work in a new OS, but it’s not new anymore.
So far I’ve tried messing with the app permissions, as that’s been an issue for a lot of apps in Sequoia; I gave PhotoLab “full disk access,” which sounded promising, but no dice.
macOS Sequoia has an even tighter security setup than Sonoma.
Sequoia also has a lot more questions of the “allow thisorthat to access nadeena blabla?” kind. Pushing the wrong button will do the rest.
There are a few ways to reset security settings though:
on an item by item basis in System Settings’ Data Security section
or as tabula rasa by typing tccutil reset All in Terminal.app
Disclaimer: Be careful when using Terminal.app. Don’t use it if it would be your first trial now. Don’t use it unless you do have a backup that works.
Yikes, a hidden lock-file, thanks for the information.
For those who don’t feel comfortable with Terminal.app
Unhide (and hide) invisible files in Finder by pressing shift-command-period and go from there. Be careful when deleting hidden files!
I had a similar error with DxO PL 8, which I purchased and activated some time ago. Suddenly today it would ask for activation after launch. Odd, I thought, but no problem: I still have the code.
After entering the code and pressing “Activate”, I received a pop-up with the error "An error occurred while writing activation data to disk.
Initially I thought some stricter security in Tahoe 26.1 was to blame, but thanks to your post I looked into the Licenses folder and lo and behold, the lock file was there:
% ls -lha ~/Library/Application\ Support/DxO/Licenses
total 16
drwxr-xr-x@ 5 marcello staff 160B 18 Nov 12:38 .
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 marcello staff 96B 2 Jun 2024 …
-rw-------@ 1 marcello staff 0B 18 Nov 09:13 .~photolab8.lock
-rw-r–r–@ 1 marcello staff 1.9K 18 Nov 12:38 photolab7.key
-rw-r–r–@ 1 marcello staff 1.9K 17 Nov 22:04 photolab8.key
I removed the file “.~photolab8.lock” and PL 8 then started normally.
The cause for this situation might have been an unclean shutdown: I did not close PL8 before shutting down the Mac: perhaps PL8 didn’t have time to properly close, got killed by the OS and left the lock file in place.
