# How to run Lightroom from a OneDrive sync folder



## wordsman (Jul 31, 2015)

Hi 

Can anyone tell me how to run Lightroom from a OneDrive sync folder please? I'm using Dropbox at the moment but as my subscription is due and I'm already paying for Office 365 want to move over. The challenge, is OneDrive doesn't seem to allow you to upload whole folders, just individual files. But Lightroom needs to manage the folders. Is it possible to upload a folder of photos (with sub-folders) and the Lightroom catalogue to OneDrive and point Lightroom to the new location?

Thanks for your help )


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## Roelof Moorlag (Aug 2, 2015)

I just tested this with some folder, subfolders and files. It is no problem to move or copy them to the Onedrive folder. Alle files are available online now.
So i think it's no problem to do a migration from Dropbox to Lightroom. Indeed, you can point Ligtroom to the new location of the folders.


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## wordsman (Aug 2, 2015)

OK I'll give it a shot, I'll copy my photos and library over, and try pointing Lightroom to OneDrive once it's all synced.


Thanks for your help


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## tspear (Aug 4, 2015)

Wordsman,

Make sure you install and run the OneDrive application. Not the web interface.
The OneDrive application like DropBox will sync a folder on your hard disk with the cloud. Here is my method when switching:
-- Uninstall the DropBox local application. This stops all syncing
-- Enable OneDrive application
-- Move folder from DropBox to OneDrive
-- Wait for OneDrive Sync to finish and verify. 
-- When Sync done, delete files on DropBox via the web interface.

This is what I do, and I have switched between most of the major cloud platforms.

Tim


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## Victoria Bampton (Aug 4, 2015)

One other note on the subject of OneDrive - I've seen some notes about people having problems with file permissions, when the files were stored in OneDrive. This was solved by manually allowing LR permission to edit files in OneDrive.


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## Gary Coombs (Jul 7, 2016)

I've been running Lightroom from my Windows OneDrive sync folder for several years.
It works beautifully.
The real value was when I had a computer failure last year.
All I needed to do was log in to my Windows 10 account and BAM, all my photos and directories were there!
I set my Lightroom Catalog to the Lightroom catalog on OneDrive and it was as if nothing had ever happened!
(I also keep a local Windows 10 USB HardDrive Backup for added security.)


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## Victoria Bampton (Jul 7, 2016)

That's good to hear Gary, and welcome to the forum!


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## Wade Shanley (Aug 5, 2016)

Victoria Bampton said:


> One other note on the subject of OneDrive - I've seen some notes about people having problems with file permissions, when the files were stored in OneDrive. This was solved by manually allowing LR permission to edit files in OneDrive.



Can you elaborate on this a bit? This is an issue Im facing right now. I have my entire Lightroom Catalog and folders on the local root of D:\Onedrive. It's been working fine and syncing folders from the local root to the Onedrive cloud. I recently installed NIK Lightroom Plugin and for some reason it won't let NIK access the Onedrive local folder to edit Lightroom files (when I rightclick a file and say edit in Silver EFex Pro  for example.  I keep getting the dreaded Lightroom was unable to prepare the selected file error. I've been on the Adobe forums and they've not been able to help. only suggestion they've given is to move my whole catalog out of the Onedrive folder. Any advice you can provide is appreciated.


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## Victoria Bampton (Aug 10, 2016)

Wade Shanley said:


> Can you elaborate on this a bit? This is an issue Im facing right now. I have my entire Lightroom Catalog and folders on the local root of D:\Onedrive. It's been working fine and syncing folders from the local root to the Onedrive cloud. I recently installed NIK Lightroom Plugin and for some reason it won't let NIK access the Onedrive local folder to edit Lightroom files (when I rightclick a file and say edit in Silver EFex Pro  for example.  I keep getting the dreaded Lightroom was unable to prepare the selected file error. I've been on the Adobe forums and they've not been able to help. only suggestion they've given is to move my whole catalog out of the Onedrive folder. Any advice you can provide is appreciated.
> View attachment 8045


I'm not sure there was ever a definitive answer Wade, but here's one of the discussions from a while back: I'm getting an error message in Lightroom 6 whe... |Adobe Community


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## Wade Shanley (Aug 10, 2016)

Thanks Victoria. I checked the thread and it's stale since late 2015. That said I finally got it working again. Not sure how but I happened to be setting up storage groups in Windows 10 so I moved my Onedrive root to the storage group and now the issue is gone. plugins and everything are working with files on local Onedrive path.  Go figure.   btw I've been reading through your Lightroom ebook and it's quite good. Nice work. I'm learning lots of things I didn't know.


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## Victoria Bampton (Aug 12, 2016)

Thanks Wade! I'm always open to suggestions for improvements.


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## tmuilenberg (Aug 24, 2016)

It took a few weeks to sync my 75,000 photos with my OneDrive synced folder on the C:drive. I then imported all of my photos into Lightroom. I set Lightroom to save metadata to the actual photo files. The problem that I'm having (that I don't see anybody else mentioning) is that every time I make a change in Lightroom, it seems to want to update all of my photos which then syncs all of the photos with OneDrive. This process is VERY slow and uses a lot of bandwidth which slows down everything else I need to do on the internet. I tried moving the catalog to a non-synced folder on my C:drive and that helped a little bit. It still takes about a day or two to sync with OneDrive every time I make a change to a photo in Lightroom. Can someone please help?


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## tspear (Aug 24, 2016)

Turn off sync files. This is the largest culprit. After that, as you use the catalog and the previews get built up there will be less and less changes. The initial load is by the worst aspect.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 24, 2016)

tmuilenberg said:


> It took a few weeks to sync my 75,000 photos with my OneDrive synced folder on the C:drive. I then imported all of my photos into Lightroom. I set Lightroom to save metadata to the actual photo files. The problem that I'm having (that I don't see anybody else mentioning) is that every time I make a change in Lightroom, it seems to want to update all of my photos which then syncs all of the photos with OneDrive. This process is VERY slow and uses a lot of bandwidth which slows down everything else I need to do on the internet. I tried moving the catalog to a non-synced folder on my C:drive and that helped a little bit. It still takes about a day or two to sync with OneDrive every time I make a change to a photo in Lightroom. Can someone please help?



Sounds like maybe those 75,000 images have not all been synched yet. When you make a change to an image in Lightroom, the changes are not applied to the original image, but stored in the catalog. Lightroom will also have to update it previews for this image. That needs to be synched (if the catalog is in the synched folder). Previews are only a few megabytes, but the catalog file can be several GB. If you set Lightroom to write changes to metadata as well, it will save a small XMP file next to the image. That also needs to be synched, but that is only a few kilobytes. The only exception is if your original images are DNG, TIFF, PSD or JPEG. In that case, the metadata are written into the file header, and that means the entire file will need to be synched again.


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## tmuilenberg (Aug 25, 2016)

Thank you for the replies.  I moved the catalog to a non-synced folder to try and speed things up. I did set Lightroom to write changes to metadata and everything seemed to synced. I then changed the metadata on a few dozen photos and it looks like ALL of my photos are now trying to sync again. It has been over 24 hours since I made these few changes and the syncing of my photos appears to be about half done.

I will try turning off the sync folder when it is done syncing and then just sync them occasionally. However, this is not an ideal solution.

My internet provider is AT&T U-verse which is supposed to be 12mb/s download, not sure what upload speed is supposed to be. Could it be that my internet speed is too slow?


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## DGStinner (Aug 25, 2016)

If your download speed is 12Mbps, your upload speed is most likely only 1.5Mbps
AT&T Speed Tiers


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## tmuilenberg (Aug 26, 2016)

I think I have solved my problem. I closed OneDrive and re-opened the OneDrive app. My files immediately showed as synced and my SpeedTest.net speed went back to 13.4mbps. We had been getting 7 or 8mbps download while OneDrive was attempting to sync. I will check back here if this doesn't solve my problem.  Thank you.


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## tmuilenberg (Aug 27, 2016)

Welllll. My problem is NOT solved. After it appeared that my files were synced I went into Lightroom and added some tags to photos in just one folder. Now ALL of my photos (in all of my folders) are trying to sync to OneDrive again.  It is now almost 24 hours later and OneDrive is saying that approx. 60,000 out of my 75,000 photos are remaining to be synced. Is Lightroom trying to save metadata to all of my files every time I exit?  Even if it is, why is OneDrive so slow?  I sure do hope someone can help me.  I'm not sure if I should scrap Lightroom or scrap OneDrive.


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## DGStinner (Aug 27, 2016)

I suspect the initial sync didn't fully complete and your internet connection is partly to blame.  If you're getting 12-15 Mbps download, you're only getting 1.5 Mbps upload.  8 Mb (small b) equals 1 MB (big B).


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 27, 2016)

That's right. It's actually quite simple: if you have a slow internet connection, don't use the cloud for huge amounts of data. This has nothing to do with Lightroom, but it has everything to do with using OneDrive to synch 75,000 photos. I have a 300 Mb connection and even I wouldn't use the cloud to store that many images.


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## tmuilenberg (Aug 27, 2016)

Thanks for the replies. Y'all have convinced me to scrap my idea of syncing my photos to OneDrive.  I still have a question about Lightroom... when I make changes to photos in one folder does Lightroom update metadata to all photos in all folders?


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 27, 2016)

tmuilenberg said:


> Thanks for the replies. Y'all have convinced me to scrap my idea of syncing my photos to OneDrive.  I still have a question about Lightroom... when I make changes to photos in one folder does Lightroom update metadata to all photos in all folders?



No. It only updates the photos you've actually changed. Normally that means it only updates the catalog, but if you have checked the option to write changes to metadata as well, it also updates the xmp files of only those images that have changed.


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## tmuilenberg (Aug 28, 2016)

OK, thanks.


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## Charlene Rose (Dec 4, 2016)

Hi there ... I am reading this thread for the first time and I have some questions.  I have just started to upload all of my photos to onedrive.  I have always had two ext HD's as backups and both of them broke down in the same WEEK!  One I dropped the other not sure yet why.  I had been in the process of uploading files to cloud, but it was slow - and I was doing a little at a time.  Now I am in a hurry and trying to get everything on my computer uploaded in case my computer HD fails (it did last December!).  So I have two major issues.  When I upload a DNG file OR a psd file that is over 100MB I cannot preview the file!  I am still in the process of waiting for the engineering team to answer why I can read the file if it's under 100 MB (meaning the technology is there) and why I cannot for anything larger.  jpegs are fine of course as they are small files.  So I thought -  if I use onedrive to store my photos from my LR and direct it to read from the onedrive, I should be able to see at least my dng files.  But I have no clue how to do this.  I have already uploaded all of my photos from LR "pictures" folder (that I still had on there mid 2014-2016) about 16K pics.  I have them all in a temporary folder with the same name as that which is in my C: drive folder.  I would like to point to the onedrive folder instead of that one on my HD.  Can you help me please.  Thanks so much!  I have pretty good computer skills, but still trying to fully understand LR - especially in this case!  Thanks/charlene


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## Wade Shanley (Dec 4, 2016)

So I just checked my onedrive and while I don't have any DNGs/PSDs over 100mb I do have some TIFFs over 100M and they don't show a preview. I'm not an expert on file types and what they can and can't do but I think it's probably a limitation of the cloud service that it's not showing a preview. That said I have videos in the multiple Gig size on Onedrive and I can see a screenshot preview so it may have something to do with limitations of the files as well. All that said I wouldn't count on OneDrive as anything more than 1 leg in a backup plan. It would be somewhat painful to use in a live workflow IMO. 

I can share that I have my all my data on my local drive redirected to a local OneDrive folder so that it automatically syncs to Onedrive in the background.  This isn't my primary back up though, it's a secondary failsafe.  My primary backup is a direct attached 5 bay 12 TB Drobo NAS. Not cheap but it's super fast with USB3 connection (thunderbolt for Mac). I have it set up so that it can have 2 of the 5 drives fail before any data loss. (I've already lost one drive and it worked flawlessly by mirroring data to the working drives giving me time to replace the failed drive). If you have tons of photos that you can't risk losing it's worth investing $ in a backup strategy and I believe any photographer who would lose their mind over data lose needs a NAS as part of their workflow or at a minimum multiple external drives.

In my workflow I have everything backing up to that local Drobo for speed and I do a secondary backup to Onedrive as a failsafe in the event something really goes wrong with the Drobo.  I also as part of my workflow final steps I export my processed "favorite" Lightroom files to folders in Onedrive via the Lightroom Onedrive plugin. In this workflow I save Large JPGs for sharing. I don't do a ton of TIFFs or large files as I really don't print much.  I've also been experimenting with the Lightroom Mobile sync as well, although I don't really think of that as backup.

In any case if you have the means I'd recommend some sort of tiered backup/workflow that doesn't rely on any one point of failure.  I personally believe due to files sizes in digital, local backup is a must. Cloud sync alone in my opinion is just too slow and risky as the only option. If you lose something while in the middle of your workflow, it's unlikely it would have all synced to the cloud with the exception of smaller jpegs.  George Lepp has a really good tip on backup workflow strategies in Outdoor Photographer that's worth a read (I can't remember which month but it was in the last year). Granted he's got the cash to do some expensive equipment, but the philosophy is Memory cards=> import to local drive=>simultaneously backup to external drives (duplicating to multiple drives preferred). He doesn't use Cloud that I'm aware of but I personally think it can be there as a part of the backup strategy, just not a primary one. 

Side note: While I am a fan of Onedrive I may go back to Carbonite as my cloud backup as they provide both local drive backup and external drive backup support as well as Disk image backup, top tiers include disk shipping for recovery. Also they don't charge incremental for storage at any tier. personal accounts are unlimited. Onedrive deal is nice with 1TB of storage included with O365 home subscription, but I'm already beyond 1TB so it's going to keep adding up, $40 for every extra 1TB of storage, which isn't bad but there are cheaper options.


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## wordsman (Jul 31, 2015)

Hi 

Can anyone tell me how to run Lightroom from a OneDrive sync folder please? I'm using Dropbox at the moment but as my subscription is due and I'm already paying for Office 365 want to move over. The challenge, is OneDrive doesn't seem to allow you to upload whole folders, just individual files. But Lightroom needs to manage the folders. Is it possible to upload a folder of photos (with sub-folders) and the Lightroom catalogue to OneDrive and point Lightroom to the new location?

Thanks for your help )


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## clee01l (Dec 4, 2016)

Wade Shanley said:


> Side note: While I am a fan of Onedrive I may go back to Carbonite as my cloud backup as they provide both local drive backup and external drive backup support


I switched to CrashPlan because Carbonite promised but never delivered external drive backup for Macs.  I used the option when I ran Windows but had to quit the app when I switched to a Mac.  Both Carbonite and  CrashPlan offer *unlimited* backup storage for a simple annual fee of ~$60USD.  OneDrive limits each user to 1TB for $84USD.  My CrashPlan backup is 1.6 TB and growing.


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## Wade Shanley (Dec 4, 2016)

clee01l said:


> I switched to CrashPlan because Carbonite promised but never delivered external drive backup for Macs.  I used the option when I ran Windows but had to quit the app when I switched to a Mac.  Both Carbonite and  CrashPlan offer *unlimited* backup storage for a simple annual fee of ~$60USD.  OneDrive limits each user to 1TB for $84USD.  My CrashPlan backup is 1.6 TB and growing.



Thanks for sharing. I also found this on the web comparing backup for macs. It does rate CrashPlan very well here. The Best Mac Online Backup Services of 2016 some of these might also be option for Windows users so worth a look.


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## tspear (Dec 5, 2016)

Note. Cloud Sync is NOT a backup.
I use OneDrive, I do not have DNG files over a 100mb in size that I know of, so I cannot comment on that issue. 
However, OneDrive cannot read the preview embedded in the file size, but the images are there just fine. I use OneDrive to sync my catalog and images between two computers.


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## Enteroctopus (Jul 18, 2018)

That is excellent advice! Thanks all for sharing. I have OneDrive because my business pays for Microsoft 365 and I have a TB there anyway, so why not use it?

Since I have multiple PCs (am not a Mac person, they don't like me) I figure I will just duplicate everything on ALL of them, so if the small town I work in gets hit by an F5 tornado, or my house does, there is almost zero probability it will happen to both.

Hard drives are CHEAP. And I have a few laying around from older machines, so why not format them and use them if necessary?


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## clee01l (Jul 19, 2018)

Enteroctopus said:


> And I have a few laying around from older machines, so why not format them and use them


All Hard Drives will fail at some point.  I have some older drives that are 8 years old. I no longer put user critical data on them, instead using them for temporary storage and redundant back ups of critical data held elsewhere.  As long as you are aware of the risks of using ancient Hard Disk drives, and do not store your only copy of critical data there then I'd say use them as I do.


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## Enteroctopus (Jul 19, 2018)

clee01l said:


> All Hard Drives will fail at some point.  I have some older drives that are 8 years old. I no longer put user critical data on them, instead using them for temporary storage and redundant back ups of critical data held elsewhere.


That's the plan. A copy at work, one at one at home, backup to OneDrive, and redundant HD storage at home.


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## PhilBurton (Jul 19, 2018)

clee01l said:


> All Hard Drives will fail at some point.  I have some older drives that are 8 years old. I no longer put user critical data on them, instead using them for temporary storage and redundant back ups of critical data held elsewhere.  As long as you are aware of the risks of using ancient Hard Disk drives, and do not store your only copy of critical data there then I'd say use them as I do.


And really old hard drives will probably have the IDE connector interface.  All modern drives have the SATA interface.  A modern computer may not even have the connectors for an IDE cable.  Time to just smash those drives (so no one can recover your private data) and then recycle them.


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## Enteroctopus (Jul 19, 2018)

Wow! I don't think anyone cares enough about me to try and steal my 2004 data. They would probably be much happier with something from at least 2015+.

"He smoked weed in college!" :0

Now it's legal in lije 25% of the country by population. Oh, no!!

That's about the worst of my dirt anyway. A few mix tapes from my buddies that are technically felonies.

:0

Oh, my!!

If they get me I will laugh at them.


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## Enteroctopus (Jul 19, 2018)

Sorry to double post, I know that's bad form. I hope everyone knows I was joking.

I do actually use a 2005 Gateway PC every day. Works for streaming, also a juke box.

It was formerly a recording studio machine with pro level sound cards, huge amounts of storage (for 2005) and still works and definitely SOUNDS great! There is some unlistenable music on there, 48,000 outtakes of guitar solos, etc. I do back up my work to that machine. It will probably crash eventually. I have more machines in storage I can use for the same purposes - Netflix, basically.

I can report that I was initially very excited about OneDrive. I uploaded 125 GB seemingly in about 15 minutes! I was shocked. But wait..

And wait...

Wait.. just wait....

24 hours later a total of 35 of my photos appear on OneDrive on my laptop (out of 15,000). So that seems to be the rub: OneDrive is likely useless as a replacement for CreativeCloud because it is slower than AOL in 1993. I feel like I am waiting to download a Nirvana album.. check after work, ooh! 21%

Wake up the next morning? Oh, oh! 36%

If anything I am nostalgic for dial up. 

Will be a good backup, though. It has it's place.


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