In Windows 11 and Windows 10, the Photos app can show your entire collection of photos and videos, from those stored locally on your computer or device to those you keep in your OneDrive cloud storage. However, when using Photos, some users don’t like that it also shows the pictures and videos they stored in OneDrive, alongside those stored locally. Some users want to view only what is saved locally on their Windows computers or devices. If you’re one of them, here is how to configure the Photos app to stop displaying your OneDrive photos and videos:
How to exclude your OneDrive pictures from the Windows Photos app
First of all, you must open the Photos app on your computer. In Windows 11, as well as in Windows 10, a quick way to do that is to use search to look for photos.
You can use search to open Photos in Windows 11 and Windows 10
TIP: There are many other methods to launch Photos, and you can find them all here: How to open Photos in Windows 10 and Windows 11 (10 ways).
Once you’ve opened the Photos app, look at its top-right corner. There, you should see a small button that resembles three suspension dots. Click or tap on it.
The See more menu button from the Photos app
On the menu that shows up, click or tap on Settings at the bottom.
The Settings option from the Photos menu
The Photos app loads its Settings page. On it, find the section called Microsoft OneDrive. The setting we require is called “Show my cloud-only content from OneDrive.”
The Microsoft OneDrive options available in the Settings app
If this setting is On, you can see cloud-only content from your OneDrive in the Photos app. In addition, you can also select, using the option under it, whether to show only the items stored in your OneDrive Pictures folder or all the pictures and videos from any folder in your OneDrive. The default setting is “Pictures folder only.”
Photos can show cloud-only content from the OneDrive pictures folder or all the OneDrive folders
If you want to stop Photos from loading your OneDrive pictures and videos, turn Off the “Show my cloud-only content from OneDrive” switch.
The Show my cloud-only content from OneDrive switch
Once you’ve disabled Photos from displaying the cloud-only content from your OneDrive, you might think that nothing had happened after returning to your photo collection. However, all you have to do is wait as Photos updates its catalog. If you have many photos in your OneDrive and stored locally on your computer, it takes just a while longer than you’d expect. Just have patience for the app to refresh, and all the cloud-only content from OneDrive will disappear from Photos.
To test it out, we made a “before & after” screenshot of the Photos app. Here is the before screenshot, in which we had some wallpapers stored only in OneDrive, shown right at the beginning of our photo Collection.
Photos showing cloud-only content from OneDrive
Once we disabled the display of our cloud-only content from OneDrive, the wallpapers were no longer listed. Furthermore, as we had no pictures stored locally on the test computer, the Photos app didn’t show anything.
Photos not showing cloud-only content from OneDrive
That’s all!
NOTE: If you want to know more about the Photos app, here are more details on what you can do with it: 14 things you can do with the Windows Photos app.
Do you want to hide your cloud-only content from OneDrive in Photos?
As you can see, setting the Photos app to stop showing your cloud-only pictures from OneDrive is easy, as long as you know where to look for the appropriate setting. If you have questions about this app or the procedure shared in this guide, don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments section.
