When using an Adobe Lightroom Classic Catalog stored in OneDrive there’s a few useful ways to make sure it doesn’t spend any extra time syncing data that isn’t needed. For example, generated previews, smart previews, or cache files.

To do this, we can make use of the “Exclude specific kinds of files” setting which stops certain files from being uploaded to OneDrive.

The feature is aimed at corporate environments (group policy) but it can also be used in a personal setup at home on both Windows and macOS.

How to excluded files show in OneDrive?

Files that aren’t allowed to sync will appear with the grey icon in the “Status” column.

With less to sync, more performance and internet bandwidth can then be given to Lightroom.

Recommended list of Adobe Lightroom files to exclude from the OneDrive sync

A file exclude approach works well as most of Lightroom’s files (at least v11) uses “lr”-specific endings which helps it not conflict with other common files you might be syncing.

We simply add filename patterns to the exclude rule that we don’t want to upload. I’d suggest adding the following filename patterns:

File Pattern	Purpose
*.lrprev	Generated preview files
*.lrcat.lock	Used to lock the catalogue from other Lightroom instances
*Previews.lrdata	Folder containing Smart and 1:1 previews
previews.db-journal	Database of the generated previews
root-pixels.db	Grid-view previews
helper.db	Folder panel search cache
*.lrcat-wal	SQLite write-ahead log file created while using Lightroom
*.lrcat-shm	SQLite shared memory temporary file created while using Lightroom
helper.db-wal
helper.db-shm
metadatahelper.db-wal
metadatahelper.db-shm

Most of the files used by Lightroom are either transient, temporary, or can be easily regenerated from the original files. This saves space in OneDrive and a lot of unnecessary syncing.

Windows: Excluding file patterns from syncing via OneDrive (without Group Policy)

You can choose to add the entries direct to the registry instead of going through Group Policy.

You can manually add numbered entries (REG_SZ) to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\OneDrive\EnableODIgnoreListFromGPO. You may need to create this key if it doesn’t already exist.

I’ve included a pre-made registry file below (a Gist and direct download) with the entries noted above, however if you already have exclusions set you’ll need to merge the entries.

macOS: Excluding file patterns from syncing via OneDrive

The same can be set up on macOS using the EnableODIgnore setting in a preferences plist file.

However, Previews can’t be excluded as they use a package folder which isn’t properly excluded by OneDrive.

Depending on whether you are using the Standalone or Apple Store version of OneDrive changes where you need to put this preferences file. You can use the About screen to identify your version.

Version	Where to put the preferences file
Standalone	/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.OneDrive.plist
App Store	/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.OneDrive-mac/Data/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.OneDrive-mac.plist