Expolumi OneDrive Album (Preview)

Scope & preview status

Use Lightroom Classic (Windows or macOS) and personal OneDrive only. Cloud Lightroom, Lightroom mobile, and OneDrive for Business are not supported. This is an album-membership Publish Service, not an upload, backup, or full two-way synchronization tool.

Originals must already exist in OneDrive and be represented in Lightroom's Folders panel beneath your local personal OneDrive root. Let OneDrive finish syncing before publishing. The plug-in does not render Develop edits, upload photo bytes, replace files, or delete source files. Virtual copies are rejected because they are not separate OneDrive files. There is no automatic background publishing.

Back up your catalog. Begin with a disposable catalog, two non-sensitive photos, and a designated test album that you are authorized to modify. Only one album publish service per catalog is supported.

Install & sign in

The preview is distributed only through Adobe Exchange. These steps apply once it is available there; they do not indicate that it is available now.

1. Install Expolumi OneDrive Album (Preview) from Adobe Exchange with the Creative Cloud desktop app (signed in with your Adobe ID): open Stock & Marketplace > Plugins, search for Expolumi, and choose Get. Creative Cloud places the OneDriveAlbums.lrplugin folder in Lightroom's Modules folder. Restart Lightroom Classic and confirm it in File > Plug-in Manager. Install only one copy; updates arrive through Creative Cloud desktop.
2. Set up OneDrive Album under Publish Services; its settings are titled Expolumi OneDrive Album. Click Sign in. The public application ID is preconfigured and not shown as a setting. You do not need to register an application, enter your own app ID, or supply a client secret.
3. Follow the browser/device-code instructions with your personal Microsoft account, even if your browser normally signs in to a work account. Review Microsoft's delegated permission request before consenting.
4. After completing sign-in in the browser, click Continue in Lightroom, then confirm your local root as described below.

The current sign-in flow uses device authorization and validates that the returned drive is personal. Microsoft's consent screen uses the registered application name Expolumi OneDrive Albums; the Lightroom product is Expolumi OneDrive Album (Preview). Each user authorizes their own account; a preconfigured application is not permission to access your photos. It is not a claim of Microsoft publisher verification.

Signing in again requires fresh root confirmation. An existing service cannot be rebound to another account: remove that service first when switching accounts. Its collections and remote data remain.

Confirm your local OneDrive root

1. In the service settings, click Choose / change OneDrive root.... The dialog shows the currently saved root.
2. Select the actual local personal OneDrive root, not a child folder such as Pictures. The list shows catalog folders; use Browse... for an existing folder that Lightroom does not list.
3. Compare the displayed account with OneDrive settings > Account in the OneDrive app (Windows or macOS). Manually verify that the selected local folder belongs to this personal account, not your work or school account. On macOS the folder is normally inside ~/Library/CloudStorage, for example OneDrive-Personal.
4. Only then check the confirmation box and save. Cancel rather than confirm uncertain ownership.

A photo under OneDrive\Pictures\Trip\photo.jpg is matched using Pictures/Trip/photo.jpg relative to the signed-in drive root. There is no arbitrary remote-folder mapping.

Create an album and publish

Albums are normal published collections under the OneDrive Album service. Add photos directly to an album. Pick flags do not filter albums: Picked, unflagged, and Rejected photos are all eligible.

1. Save your account and root settings first. Then right-click OneDrive Album in Publish Services and choose Create Album.... This is the only way to create an album. Lightroom also shows Create Smart Album...; that dialog is blocked with guidance to create a normal album instead.
2. Enter a name and wait for the duplicate-name check. Local and OneDrive album names are compared case-insensitively. A failed check keeps the name so you can retry; Cancel creates nothing.
3. Drag photos into the album, then click Publish and check the batch results. A new remote album is created only after the first photo resolves successfully, not when the empty local album is created.

Before adding a photo, publishing checks the OneDrive album's membership by file ID, so a photo that is already in the album is not added twice. Names are checked again at Publish, because another app can create an album in the meantime.

The built-in default collection, labelled OneDrive photos on new services, is a placeholder and may be deleted. Renaming an album locally does not rename an already-linked remote album; its ID preserves the link.

Albums from earlier preview builds

Earlier builds created each album as a regular collection under Expolumi > Albums plus a published Smart Collection. These pairs keep working and are not converted. The Smart Collection selects every photo in its paired regular collection, regardless of Pick flag; add or remove photos in the regular collection.

Keep the generated unique suffix, such as Travel [OD12C34X]. Lightroom's collection-name rule is a text search, not a collection-ID comparison, so do not remove the suffix or reuse it in other names. Publishing also checks exact membership. Library > Plug-in Extras > OneDrive Albums: Manage collections... > Repair restores managed names and rules. A moved or deleted regular collection causes an error: restore it rather than create a new empty source.

Discover existing albums

Existing album sync is optional and off by default. In the service settings, check Enable existing album sync (discover albums when saving) and save, or use Manage collections > Discover. Clear the checkbox and save to stop discovery; this does not unlink albums, remove collections, or delete photos.

Discovered albums start empty. Discovery reads album names and IDs only and creates one empty published album for each unlinked OneDrive album. It does not import photos, change Pick flags, mark photos as published, or remove remote members.

Show the photos already in an album. Choose Manage collections... > Find album photos in the catalog and mark them as published. For every linked album, the plug-in lists the album's photos in OneDrive and looks for each at the same path under your confirmed OneDrive root, with the same file size. It shows per album how many it found, how many are already published, and how many it could not match (for example not imported into the catalog, a different size, or another account). After you confirm, the found photos are added to their album as already published. OneDrive is not changed and nothing is uploaded. Smart Collection albums from earlier builds are skipped.

To add to an existing album, drag new photos into its discovered album and click Publish. They join the OneDrive album. The preview is not a two-way sync: run the find-and-mark action again to pick up photos added in OneDrive.

Repeating discovery reuses already-linked IDs rather than creating more albums. Linking a same-named, unlinked published album requires confirmation. Conflicting already-linked names stop discovery instead of merging. Albums created before a failure remain and are reused on retry.

Matching & metadata

Photo matching runs asynchronously during Publish, not as an idle catalog scan. It validates cached identities for the confirmed drive and root, then tries the exact cloud-relative path. Filename fallback is filtered by exact filename, drive, parent path, and size when available. Duplicate or unverifiable matches fail instead of being guessed.

In Library > Metadata, choose the OneDrive Albums metadata view to inspect OneDrive item ID, OneDrive drive ID, and OneDrive match status (Resolved or Needs attention). These are plug-in-owned catalog fields, not keywords or file edits.

Resolved does not mean published. IDs are written as soon as matching succeeds. Lightroom marks publishing successful only after the album-membership operation succeeds, so a later album error can leave a valid resolved ID. The same remote file can be tracked in several albums without another upload.

Photos outside the root, virtual copies, foreign cached drive IDs, ambiguous matches, and API errors appear in Lightroom and the final batch summary. A successful lookup needs no per-photo prompt. Cloud search indexes and sync can lag: let OneDrive finish syncing before retrying. Do not switch accounts or approve a different root merely to bypass a match error.

Removal, retries & recovery

• Remove a photo from its album (or, for an older pair, from its regular collection), then process Lightroom's pending removal through Publish. Only membership in that tracked album is removed, never the underlying file or its other album memberships. Changing Pick flags does not remove membership.
• Deleting a collection or service, or removing a photo from the catalog, leaves remote albums and files untouched. Local collections remain.
• Retrying ordinary membership failures recognizes existing membership rather than duplicating it. Cancellation stops subsequent work but does not undo already-completed requests.
• Throttled or transient reads and membership operations have bounded retries. A possibly successful album-creation request is not blindly replayed.
• After interrupted album creation, enable existing album sync, run Discover, and confirm linking the result. Only if you verify in OneDrive that no album was created, including a renamed copy, use Retry an interrupted album creation in the album's settings. The plug-in also checks for a same-named album before allowing another attempt. If OneDrive definitely rejects a creation request, nothing was created and you can simply Publish again.
• If a linked album is missing, publishing fails instead of silently creating a replacement.

Privacy & permissions

Sign-in and Microsoft Graph requests use Microsoft HTTPS endpoints. Requests include cloud-relative paths, filename searches, file identifiers, album names, and membership changes, not original photo bytes. The delegated Files.ReadWrite permission is broader than a single folder, although this preview exposes no file-upload, file-replacement, or file-delete operation. offline_access supports refresh tokens.

Tokens and remembered identity use Lightroom's encrypted password storage, scoped by application and drive. Sign out clears local authorization; separately remove the app's consent in your Microsoft account to revoke access at Microsoft. No telemetry or background account discovery is added.

Read the privacy and data-handling guide and Microsoft's consent screen before authorizing access. The stock-publishing tools' FTP workflow does not describe this integration.

First-use checks

Before relying on the preview, use your disposable catalog and designated test album to check:

• Personal-account sign-in and root ownership with both personal and business sync folders present; never confirm an incorrect root.
• Native Create Album... from the service root, duplicate-name checks, and publishing Picked, unflagged, and Rejected photos from one album.
• Actual album membership in OneDrive Photos on web or mobile, unchanged original files with no extra upload, metadata after restart, and republishing without duplicates.
• A photo in two albums: removing it from one must preserve the file and other membership. Enable existing album sync, discover twice, and check for one empty album per OneDrive album with unchanged remote members; then publish one new photo to it.
• Cancellation, renaming, missing or ambiguous files, token refresh and revocation, and interrupted-creation recovery without duplicate albums.

Support & feature requests

Something not working as described here? Open a support case. Have an idea? Request a feature, or ask a question in Discussions.

These are public on GitHub and need a GitHub account. Leave out passwords, tokens, OneDrive account names, and private file paths.