I believe this is because the Qt dialogs read meta-information for each file in order to show the appropriate file icons in the browser. I'm not aware of any way to stop that. If you typically only use a few OneDrive folders with ChimeraX, you can mitigate the “hit” by putting those folders in your Favorites so you can get to them directly without navigating through other folders. You can’t add to ChimeraX’s open-dialog Favorites directly, but if you add the folders to the Finder Favorites, they will show up in the open dialog. You can add the folders directly to the save dialog (the “Look in” column).

On Nov 20, 2025, at 2:47 AM, David Bhella via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Dear ChimeraX users and team,

I am wondering if anyone can advise how to stop OneDrive trying to download the contents of every folder I navigate through when trying to e.g. save an image or open a file?

I haven’t seen this behaviour with any other software, but as I maintain a lot of my work on OneDrive, it would be nice to be able to interact directly with the working folder. At the moment I need to work on a local folder and then copy files across when saving, and open files through finder rather than the ChimeraX dialog, otherwise my Mac locks up while it tries to download everything in every folder it sees.

Thanks,

D

David Bhella
Professor of Structural Virology
Director, Scottish Centre for Macromolecular Imaging
Associate Director, MRC - University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research
+44 (0)141 330 3685
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