Revisit: Change location of iCloud Photos folder

I know this topic has been beat to death, but I think I have some additional results that may be of interest. I am writing this to highlight the wacky way iCloud for Window and OneDrive don't play nice together.

The official word is the location of the iCloud Photos folder under C:\Users\<user>\Pictures\iCloud Photos can't be changed. Well there are a couple of ways to side step this statement.

Redirect the Pictures shortcut.

In Windows under This PC in the Explorer navigation pane there are some System shortcuts one of which is Pictures. If you click on that it takes you to the folder C:\Users\<user>\Pictures. Which, you notice above, is the actual folder where the iCloud Photos folder resides.

• • First you want to disable iCloud Photos before you do this.
  • Then you right-click the Pictures shortcut and select Properties. In that dialog you see a tab Location.
  • Below that you see the path that the shortcut is directed to. Click Move, then navigate to the location you want and click Apply.
  • You will get a pop-up that says .."do you want to move the files", click Yes.
  • When you re-enable, your photos will be on the path you specified. Of course, you have moved ALL the files under Pictures.

This folder can be on another internal disk such as D:\. On my D:\ disk I create a folder: D:\Users\<user> and direct the shortcut there.

Force iCloud Photos to redirect.

This has some potential pitfalls. As you may know, if you have OneDrive Sync and Backup enabled for the Pictures folder. If iCloud Photos is disabled or logged off, this moves the C:\Users\<user>\Pictures folder and all files and sub-folders (and shortcut target locations) to

C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\Pictures. The files are then synced to the OneDrive online storage.

When you then enable iCloud Photos storage, a notification pops up saying that It found an online storage system and it is relocating iCloud Photos to C:\Users\<user>\iCloud Photos\Photos.

You can then turn off OneDrive Sync and Backup. This is stable unless you disable iCloud Photos or logout of your iCloud account. When you enable iCloud Photos again, it will revert to the C:\Users\<user>\Pictures folder location.

One other notes if you enable and then disable OneDrive Sync and Backup of Pictures.

• • The files it moved to C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\Pictures remain there and you have to manually move them back to C:\Users\<user>\Pictures.
  • There is a problem if the size of your Pictures folder (or combined space you direct to OneDrive) is larger that the OneDrive storage you are signed up for.

If iCloud Photos is enabled when you turn on OneDrive Sync and Backup, OneDrive says it can't backup Pictures because another online backup is running.

So this also points to the conclusion that the code to redirect the iCloud Photos location is present in the iCloud for Windows code, but they need to create a function to enable it like they do for the Shared folder.

Any wagers on how long, if ever, that takes to gets done? NOT!