Windows 10 Photo App Missing Images, Some Images Not Showing in Win10 Photo App When Source is Network Path or Mapped Drive - Move Offline Files Location in Windows 10

In this article:

• Windows 10 Photo App Missing Images
• Some Images Not Showing in Win10 Photo App When Source is Network Path or Mapped Drive
• How to Move Offline Files Location in Windows 10

I recently installed Windows 10 and i really liked the Photo app and its simplicity is very alluring to me so i decided to go all out and let it index all my photos and see what it has to offer.

it took a while to index the images and the collection was built and showed what appeared to be all of my pictures.  it wasnt until i imported some new images and they didnt show up in the collection that i began to notice there was a problem.  

some research later and i read that the collection is built from the search index cache in windows.  the search indexer doesnt allow you to add network locations directly unless they are set to be "available offline" and then it indexes them by making use of their offline storage location on your computer's hard drive.

So from this we know that:

• if you want to add images to the photo app collection they need to be in a location that is indexed by the search indexer. 
• If you want the search indexer to index a network location, it needs to be on a mapped drive that is set to "make available offline"
• so if you want to add photos from your network attached storage (NAS) to the windows 10 photo app then you need to map a drive an set it to be available offline.

From the above there is a problem.  generally you would have quite a large amount of data in your image library, or on your NAS in general.  if you have a 256GB SSD on your computer then making your NAS available offline is probably not going to be an option since offline files are stored on the same drive that windows is installed on.  specifically the c:\Windows\CSC folder.  Given that most people would have a few TB on their NAS your computers hard drive isnt going to cut it.

You might be thinking "simple, ill just change the location of the offline files folder to a location on a spare drive on my PC!".  not so easy i'm afraid.  but im going to show you a way to do this that is quite cool.

basically you need a spare hard drive that you can devote completely to your offline file storage.

firstly you need to turn offline files off, then reboot, then take ownership of the c:\windows\csc folder.

Takeown /r /f C:\Windows\CSC

then you need to delete the contents of the CSC folder 

you need to then bring the hard drive up in disk management, delete the volumes that exist on it if any, and create a new volume.  then when creating the volume mount it to an NTFS folder "c:\windows\csc".

now the CSC folder is mounted on the spare hard drive.  now turn offline files on again, then reboot.

now you can start making network folders offline and the data will be stored on the spare HDD.