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How to run Lightroom from a OneDrive sync folder

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wordsman

New Member
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Jun 29, 2015
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Intermediate
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 :eek:)
 
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.
 
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 :grin:
 
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
 
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.
 
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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That's good to hear Gary, and welcome to the forum!
 
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.
upload_2016-8-5_10-59-43.png
 
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
 
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.
 
Thanks Wade! I'm always open to suggestions for improvements.
 
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?
 
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.
 
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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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?
 
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.
 
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.
 
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).
 
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.
 
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?
 
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.
 
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
 
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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