The Storage Studio location in Finder

Storage Studio adds a Storage Studio entry to the Locations section of Finder's sidebar. Inside it, each of your connected cloud accounts, your external drive's Home folder and each paired device appears as a folder. You browse and work with them like any other folder in Finder. Files show as online-only until you open them, and then download on demand.

What you see there

• One folder per cloud account you've connected in Storage Studio. See Cloud accounts.
• Home — the Storage Studio folder on your external drive. Some folders in it are protected. See The Home folder in the Finder location.
• One folder per paired device, named after the device. See Bridge: connecting another device.
• A Photos folder for each extra Apple ID you've connected, next to its iCloud Drive folder. It's read-only, and the Hidden and Recently Deleted albums never appear. See iCloud Photos of another Apple ID.

Google Photos accounts aren't included. See Why Google Photos isn't in the Finder location.

What you can do

In your account and device folders you can open, edit, rename, move and delete files and folders, and the changes are sent to the account. The top-level folders themselves (one per account or device) can't be renamed or deleted from Finder, but you can add files into them. If you move or rename something onto a name that's already taken, the change is refused rather than the existing item being replaced.

%% caption: How a file in the Storage Studio location opens
flowchart TD
  A[You open a file in the Storage Studio location] --> B{Is it already on this Mac?}
  B -->|Yes| C[It opens straight away]
  B -->|No| D[Storage Studio downloads it from the account]
  D --> C
  C --> E[You stop using it]
  E --> F[After the time you chose, it goes back to online-only]

How long an opened file stays on your Mac is up to you. See Keep opened files on this Mac.

Turning it on or off

It's on by default. To change it, open Remotes & Accounts (Connect Accounts… in the More menu, or Cloud Accounts… in the popover) and choose the Mounting tab:

• Mount everything as one Finder drive turns the whole location on or off.
• Under Cloud accounts, This Mac and Devices, each source has its own switch, so you choose what appears. An account that can't be reached is marked unavailable and skipped until it's back, without disturbing the others.
• When everything is working, the status line says On — in Finder under Locations, as “Storage Studio”.

The Finder button at the top of the main window opens the location directly. See The Finder button in the main window.

When you quit Storage Studio, the location disappears from Finder. It comes back when you open the app again.

Big folders and thumbnails

A large folder is handed to Finder a page at a time, and a folder you've visited before opens straight away from its saved listing. See Large folders appear a page at a time. Pictures, videos and documents show thumbnails on accounts where that costs you nothing. See Thumbnails, and why some accounts show plain icons.

If the location can't start

On the rare Mac where the location can't start, Storage Studio falls back to a mounted drive so your files stay reachable. That drive isn't in the sidebar, so the Mounting tab says when you're on it and offers Open the Drive. See When the location falls back to a mounted drive. If the location is missing altogether, see The Storage Studio location is missing from Finder.

See also: Cloud accounts · Data Transfers · Storage Studio's cloud accounts and iCloud Drive