Onedrive fiasco on Windows

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
March 12, 2025
2 replies
940 views

Hi.

I have Onedrive, like most pcs, and Lightroom stores the catalog files under photos. This automatically gets Onedrive to sync. It's causing me major headaches. Onedrive is asking me to confirm deleting thousands of files--which appear to be previews.

At this point I'd like to move lightroom out of onedrive. Can I just copy the files on another internal drive and redirect lightroom to that catalog? Under pictures I have a Lightroom folder and a Lightroom Catalog folder. I think the former is the more current. Does lightroom only create the one folder usually?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Windows

Correct answer Per Berntsen

LrC and Onedrive do not work well together, and can lead to catalog corruption.

The catalog folder can be anywhere, I suggest that you move it to the root of the C drive, like C:\Lightroom Catalog. Do this with LrC closed. Then double-click the catalog file to launch LrC from the new location.

You have to examine the two Lightroom folders you have and find out which one is current.

You can also go to Edit > Catalog settings and click the Show button to open the folder with the File explorer.

The catalog folder contains all the files and folders required, no additional folders are created.

Per Berntsen

Correct answer

Community Expert

LrC and Onedrive do not work well together, and can lead to catalog corruption.

The catalog folder can be anywhere, I suggest that you move it to the root of the C drive, like C:\Lightroom Catalog. Do this with LrC closed. Then double-click the catalog file to launch LrC from the new location.

You have to examine the two Lightroom folders you have and find out which one is current.

You can also go to Edit > Catalog settings and click the Show button to open the folder with the File explorer.

The catalog folder contains all the files and folders required, no additional folders are created.

B

bertm63698953Author

Participant

So simple! Thank you so much! You have no idea how much Onedrive has been driving me nuts lately. When I realized it was trying to delete thousands of photos and found out it was lightroom previews, I realized I had to move that away from Onedrive. Thank you for the clear and concise explanation. This is a huge help!

D

dnewman31

Participant

OneDrive is not deleting the files, Lightroom is (it periodically purges previews to save space, I think the default is to delete 1:1 previews at 30 days). OneDrive is actually doing you a solid by saying "hey, we saw a bunch of files get deleted, did you mean to do that?" and giving you an out (in case of mass accidental deletion).

I safely use OneDrive to store my catalog (have for over a decade now). I follow simple rules to make sure things don't get messed up, like making sure my catalog has completely sync'd from my desktop to my laptop before traveling and using that library (and the inverse when I get back). You can mitigate a lot of issues by marking the folder containing your lightroom catalog with OneDrives "Always keep on this device". Also, I regularly backup the catalog to a different location, particularly after large imports and sorting/processing.

DdeGannes

Community Expert

There are more than one option to avoid problems and that will depend on the resources available on your computer hardware.

Provide the actual version (numeric) of Lightroom and your operating system, Ram, HDD capacity, GPU etc.

Regards, Denis: iMac 27” mid-2015, macOS 11.7.10 Big Sur; 2TB SSD, 24 GB Ram, GPU 2 GB; LrC 12.5,; Lr 6.5, PS 24.7,; ACR 15.5,; (also Laptop Win 11, ver 24H2, LrC 15.0.1, PS 27.0; ) Camera Oly OM-D E-M1.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded