Forum Discussion
Camera Roll taking up too much space on laptop
Hi, I have a Windows 10 laptop and everything is backed up using OneDrive. After taking any photos with my camera phone, they appear in the Camera Roll on my laptop and for those I want to keep, I copy and paste them into new designated folders on my laptop, e.g. Pictures/2023/Holiday to Greece. This is perfect as I can view/edit all my photos in their designated folders. However, I started realising that my laptop was becoming much slower and it was because OneDrive was not only updating all of the pictures I’d moved into their designated folders (e.g. Pictures/2023/Holiday to Greece) but it was also downloading the entire contents of the Camera Roll back onto my hard drive, which stretches back many years and takes up a massive amount of space. I just want to be able to open my laptop and view/edit all old photos in their designated folders, plus view/edit any new photos in Camera Roll before deciding whether to keep them or not. This seems like a straightforward and commonsense approach to managing my photos, but it seems like it isn’t possible; I either have to have my laptop showing no photos at all (both from the Camera Roll or all designated folders) or I have to let OneDrive download absolutely everything onto my laptop (including the very large Camera Roll folder). Can anyone help?
1 Reply
Yes, OneDrive is often a massive disappointment, a solution for some problem we don't have.
You get 1 TB with Office 365 but as of now (May 2025) it's hard to see how it is used. I suspect I have 250 ~ 300 GB of photos and videos. If I sync (keep local copies) I'll use most of my expensive SSD. If I don't, and want to open the Camera Roll to grab a video I just took with a USB camera, it takes forever. I usually give up, especially with a weak internet connection. The OneDrive website will quickly show me the largest files I have, and other useless things but not easily the info I want.I wish it could download just the names of the files without thumbnails...that might suit me better. One nice step to add to that would be to download/sync a thumbnail on request.
