Problems re onedrive

[Nhojdrib]

Hi
With ongoing problems on my home network (preventing me from accessing photos held on another PC in the building) I decided to upload all my tif files from both computers and my laptop to onedrive thinking it would then be easy to access them and workon an image (captioning etc) in PM from whichever of my devices I wanted I have successfully uploaded 4000+ files and I can see them all in File explorer on my W11 pCs. I can also open any one of them up through File explorer and in about 3 seconds I am viewing it in PShop. However when I try to view the onedrive folder in PM nothing happens other than a not responding message. What is blocking things? Is PM trying to download all 4000 images on to my local PC beofre opening any of them up? Is there a setting I need to change. Clearly I dont want them all downloaded back on to my PC I just want to work on a particular image. Any ideas?
thanks
John

[ahoward]

Photo Mechanic isn't specifically making a request to download the files, however, it is accessing them no differently than it would any other folder on your computer. When you open a contact sheet, Photo Mechanic opens the files so it can parse the metadata. In response to this, the OneDrive process that runs on your computer kicks off a download, and now your folder is essentially acting like a very slow storage device.

I can also open any one of them up through File explorer and in about 3 seconds I am viewing it in PShop.

Photoshop opening the file is causing it to be downloaded as well. It's just that Photoshop is working with one file and not 4000. When you try to open multiple files in Photoshop, it also hangs until the download is finished (at least it did for me when I just tried).

There's no setting to change, Photo Mechanic is just not really designed around cloud storage services. I've heard of many users using Onedrive successfully to sync metadata changes between computers, but it's not going to do well if the files aren't on your computer.

[Nhojdrib]

Thanks. That's what I feared. If the home network operated properly I wouldnt have put all my eggs in the onedrive basket. It seems from every online forum that Windows is now designed to discourage using your own network ad tried to force you into onedrive. What a pain.
John