Cloud-native library support

[tollanes]

Cloud-native library support

Hi! My photo library is getting close to 1 TB, and RapidRAW tends to download at least some data whenever a folder is opened.

With services like OneDrive, this usually works fairly well because the files RapidRAW needs can simply be downloaded on demand.

However, I recently moved to Pop!_OS, and getting OneDrive to work reliably with RapidRAW has been a bit of a challenge. In some cases, RapidRAW would even crash when it tried to access a file that OneDrive was unable to download.

I tested a few different syncing approaches and eventually got things working reasonably well, but there are still several usability caveats. In practice, I ended up more or less fully syncing my library to disk beforehand.

That is obviously a fairly specific use case, but it made me wonder whether a more cloud-native workflow could be an interesting future addition to RapidRAW.

For example:

• Connect RapidRAW directly to OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or another supported cloud provider.
• Browse the cloud library directly inside RapidRAW.
• Download originals, previews, or other required data on demand while editing.
• Cache files locally when needed instead of requiring the entire library to be synced beforehand.

The ideal experience would basically be: log into your cloud storage provider, open your library, and start editing without having to manage a separate filesystem sync setup.

I understand that this would probably be a significant feature to implement, especially with the differences between cloud providers, caching, offline access, and file availability.

Still, I wanted to throw the idea out there, especially for people with larger libraries where keeping everything permanently stored on a local disk is not ideal.