How to access external hard drive on Linux in Atom when opening folder?

[ghost]

I wish to open a project folder located on an external hard drive on Ubuntu linux so I'm going through the /meda/[my user name]/[name of external]/ pathway when the file browser opens, but it says permission denied. I specifically added access to all external files for all users using chmod -R a+rwx /media/[my user name]/, but that doesn't seem to have done anything.

Do I just have to copy past the file folder to a local directory to be able to edit it? I was previously working in Windows but Windows crashed on me and I can't recover it, so I'm on my Ubuntu partition now.

-mike

Edit:
Hi it's been a few weeks and I haven't received an answer. This is still an issue for me; I can't find a solution on the internet. I changed the file permissions on my linux system to rwx for all, and the owner is now me instead of root, of the folder on the "external" I wish to access, but atom still refuses to open it. The folder in question is actually just on an internal HDD instead of the SSD, which hosts the OS. The HDD has more space and I want to save the SSD for OS and system critical files only.