Hi Anthony,

The app is designed to exclude folders with names like "Onedrive", "Dropbox" or "Windows" (system folders) as a protective measure to prevent accidental inclusion of your Onedrive folder.

However, there is a workaround. You can trick the system by creating a symbolic link. You can execute this on the command line:
mklink /J C:\myphotos C:\Users\YourUserName\OneDrive\Pictures
(You will need to replace "YourUserName" with your actual user name.)

Please note that this action will prompt the OneDrive client to sync all files, making them locally available. If the files are not already synced, they will be downloaded during this process, which may take some time.

The issue with the Onedrive folder is that it appears as a typical folder to regular apps. However, accessing it becomes sluggish when the files are not locally available. Moreover, if there's no internet connection or if Onedrive servers are down, errors occur that are impossible for genuine local files.

We received complaints about the app's slow syncing performance, and upon investigation, we discovered that it was linked to this folder. Consequently, we have made the decision to exclude it.

In a future version we will improve this process by asking users that try to add the OneDrive folder if they want to use the proper Onedrive connection.

Do you have any particular reason why you don't want to use the dedicated OneDrive source?

Best regards,

Stefan

Hi Anthony,

Photo Commander as well as every other app sees the OneDrive folder like a regular folder.

If you have all files downloaded to your disc there is no issue. To use it with Photo Organizer you can set a symlink to trick the logic that prevents you from selecting the OneDrive folder. That’s not a duplication of files.

The issue is that some people don’t want or can’t have all files they have in OneDrive locally on their disk. Windows does show them in the folder, but in reality they are downloaded the very moment you access them. Maybe you noticed the cloud icon aside the file name some files in the OneDrive folder have. These files are not really on your disk, but are downloaded when you access them. Photo Organizer does access all files to read their metadata.

If you successfully use Photo Commander and other tools right now this situation does not apply to you and you can use Photo Organizer safely here.

For that just create the symlink as shown above and add that path to Photo Organizer.

It’s strange that your files do not show up if you use the OneDrive connection. Did the sync complete? If you have many photos OneDrive cloud needs so time to send over a file list. For about 25k files I use to test the app this takes up to 5 minutes unfortunately. OneDrive servers are not very fast apparently.

The whole situation would be better if Microsoft would provide a way to see in which state files in the OneDrive folder are. Right now it’s magic. It could be available on disk and super fast or take several seconds to download first. Microsoft designed it in a way that it’s transparent to apps. They don’t know it. If you open only the files you want to work on in a photo editor this is not a problem at all. But if you want to read all files to scan their metadata and create thumbnails from, you run into problems. Especially when you have more gigabytes in the cloud as you have on your local hard drive.

I think from your feedback we can learn that we need to explain this situation with OneDrive a lot better. So thank you again for reaching out.

Kind regards,

Stefan

Hi Anthony,

I'm glad that worked for you! :)

Let me know if you find anything else we can improve on.

Meanwhile I'm looking into improving this process.

Kind regards,

Stefan