My photo library is divided into two parts (older than 5 years and newer). The older part is on dropbox and marked online-only.
In Lightroom I can access the pictures in the older library - which causes the images to download onto my local hard drive. That is ok.
What I would like to achieve is that I could run a macro from time to time to set the folder for the older pictures to online only - which would free up space by removing the local copy.
As I haven't found any CLI for dropbox to achieve that, I was wondering is there is a way to do it with Keyboard Maestro.
Is the older part of your library only on Dropbox? Or is it backed up somewhere else as well? I use Dropbox and one of its strengths is that files exist in several places.
If your reason for making these files online only is that you don't want to use up space on your Mac's hard drive I would suggest another solution is to use a large external drive for your Dropbox files. The Dropbox folder does not need to be on your local drive.
There is probably a way of achieving something like this with Keyboard Maestro but I wanted to first check if there might be a better way to manage your files.
Thanks for your reply.
I am working from a macbook and would like to avoid having an external drive connected to it. My files are backed up locally as well. I have an old iMac with external hdds.
Your post got me thinking to maybe change the setting a bit. Back up from the iMac, move the older images from the macbook to the imac and have them available in Lightroom. This would achieve my goal as well to free space on the macbook.
If you're on Sequoia you can use ⌃Return to open a selected item's contextual menu -- making this much easier than it used to be. So I hope you're on Sequoia!
Assuming a folder structure like
...it's now June 2025 so you want to offline the "May" folder inside the "2020" folder because it is more than 5 years old. You can create the path and open that "May" folder in Finder using the %ICUDateTimeMinus% token:
...and a quick ⌘↑ takes you to the parent folder but with the "May" folder still selected. You can then trigger the contextual menu and make the selection.
You'll have to adjust the path to suit your setup and requirements, of course.
I can't fully test this because we're in-between Dropbox licences right now and DB is throwing spurious confirmation dialogs, but it should be enough to get you started.
Thanks @Nige_S I am on Sonoma and intend to stay with it. I will think about your solution and see if I can come up with something.
In Alfred there is a menu search workflow which I have to check and see if I can make something work along your idea.
Thanks.
