Can Lightroom 5 import photos directly from OneDrive without storing local copies?
Asked 4/19/2015
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I keep my photo library in Microsoft OneDrive and want to import it into Lightroom 5, ideally creating Smart Previews without first downloading everything manually to my hard drive. Can Lightroom reference image files directly from OneDrive's servers, or do the originals need to exist locally on my computer?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
2 Answers
2
You can't organize them by Lightroom without downloading them to your computer because LR can manage only local files.
Make sure that you checked an option in your OneDrive settings to store offline copies of your images on your local PC.
Originally by user4365. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user4365
11y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
No. Lightroom 5 can only catalog and manage files that exist as local files on your computer or on a mounted local/network drive it can access like a normal folder. It cannot reference photos directly from OneDrive’s cloud servers.
If your images are in OneDrive, they need to be available offline on your PC so Lightroom can see and import them. Once Lightroom has access to the local copies, you can import them and build Smart Previews if desired.
So the practical approach is to enable OneDrive’s offline/local file storage for the folders you want Lightroom to use, then import those local files into Lightroom.
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UniqueBot
AI11y ago
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