How to Add or Remove Favorites in OneDrive Photos App on Windows 11
A large photo library stops being something anyone scrolls through to find one shot. OneDrive Photos has a Favorites feature built for exactly that problem: mark the images worth keeping close, then pull every favorited photo into one filtered view inside Gallery. This guide covers how to add or remove favorites in the OneDrive Photos app on Windows 11, using Microsoft's documentation, with one clearly labeled comparison to the separate Windows Photos app.
Two of those three tasks are fully confirmed: marking a photo, and filtering Gallery to find it again. The third, removing that status once it's set, has no documented control as of this week (Microsoft Support). This guide walks through the confirmed steps first, then answers the removal question directly instead of guessing at a menu that hasn't been documented anywhere.
This is separate from the Favorites section in File Explorer, which lists OneDrive files inside File Explorer Home rather than inside the Gallery app. A Windows update from two weeks ago even addressed a bug involving duplicate OneDrive entries in that same File Explorer section (Microsoft Support), which is a good sign the two features are tracked and updated independently.
OneDrive Photos needs to be installed on Windows 11, signed in, and already syncing photos into Gallery before any of this works. No synced photos means nothing to favorite or filter yet.
What Microsoft confirms about OneDrive Photos favorites
Microsoft describes OneDrive Photos as letting users "create Albums, mark Favorites, and edit photos directly in the app" (Microsoft Support), grouping all three under one line without detailing how each control actually works. Favoriting gets confirmed as real functionality. How to trigger it isn't spelled out.
The payoff shows up in Gallery. Once a photo is favorited, it becomes retrievable through the Favorites option in the Filter menu, listed alongside filters for media type, people, source, orientation, and resolution (Microsoft Support). The people filter runs on face grouping, a separate automatic feature that clusters recurring faces across a library; that grouping can be turned off from the desktop app, and doing so clears the underlying facial data within 30 days (Microsoft Support). Favorites doesn't lean on any of that automation. It sits in the same filter list as those recognition-driven categories without depending on them.
That distinction matters when comparing favorites to tags, which sound similar on paper but work differently. OneDrive automatically creates tags for things it recognizes in a photo, and Microsoft says it sometimes makes mistakes, since tags can be edited or removed by hand (Microsoft Support). A favorite has no recognition step behind it at all. It's simply a status applied directly, one photo at a time, with nothing automatic guessing at it first.
How to add a photo to favorites in OneDrive Photos
Open OneDrive Photos and find the image in Gallery view. The app is built for browsing and managing photos directly within it, so there's no need to open a separate editor first (Microsoft Support).
Microsoft confirms marking a photo as a favorite is possible but doesn't say which button, icon, or menu triggers it in the current interface (Microsoft Support). That's a notable gap for a feature described plainly everywhere else on the same page.
Tag removal in this same app requires hovering over a photo to reveal its controls first, a documented interaction pattern elsewhere in OneDrive Photos (Microsoft Support). Whether marking a favorite follows that same hover-then-select pattern isn't confirmed anywhere. It's a reasonable place to look, not a guaranteed answer.
The nearest reference point comes from a related but separate app. The standalone Windows Photos app has an "Add to Favorites" button that adds an open image to a dedicated favorites list, though that feature is limited to JPEG images and MP4 videos (Thurrott). Windows Photos and OneDrive Photos are different applications built by the same company. A button confirmed in one shouldn't be assumed to exist, or behave the same way, in the other, even if the naming overlap makes that assumption tempting.
Whatever the actual control turns out to be, the Favorites filter in Gallery is the way to check whether a photo has been marked. That's covered next.
How to view and filter favorite photos in OneDrive Photos
Open Gallery and select Filter at the top of the view (Microsoft Support).
Choose Favorites from the filter list. It sits alongside filters for media type, people, source, orientation, and resolution (Microsoft Support).
Applying that filter shows the photos currently marked as favorites. This is the most fully documented step in the entire workflow, and it's the fastest way to check whether a photo landed in the favorites list, regardless of which control was used to mark it in the first place. If a photo doesn't turn up here after an attempt to favorite it, that's the clearest signal something in the marking step didn't take.
Removing a favorite in OneDrive Photos: what's documented so far
Microsoft documents how to remove the OneDrive Photos experience, not how to remove a single photo's favorite status.
The cited Microsoft support page does not describe an unfavorite button, toggle, or menu item (Microsoft Support). That's the direct answer for anyone searching for one right now.
That absence isn't proof the option doesn't exist somewhere in the interface. The same page states that Microsoft is adding controls to remove the OneDrive Photos experience separately from the OneDrive app entirely (Microsoft Support). That's a different feature from unfavoriting a single photo, but it shows the app's control set is still being built out. As of now, the only documented way to remove the OneDrive Photos experience altogether is to uninstall OneDrive (Microsoft Support), which is a far bigger step than undoing one favorite and not a workaround worth reaching for here.
What is documented, and shouldn't be confused with favorites, is tag removal. Hover over a photo to show its controls, select the option to open the info pane, then select the X next to a tag to remove it, according to Microsoft's documentation on organizing photos, published in 2024 (Microsoft Support). That control is built specifically for auto-generated tags. Nothing in that documentation extends it to favorites, so there's no basis for assuming a similar X appears next to a favorited photo, or that it would do the same job if it did.
For now, that means favoriting is a one-way action within the app's current documentation.
Conclusion
Marking a photo as a favorite and filtering Gallery to find those favorites are both confirmed, working parts of OneDrive Photos, even without an exact button name for the marking step (Microsoft Support). Removing a favorite sits outside the current documentation entirely, and it isn't the same task as removing a tag, which has a clear, hover-and-click process of its own (Microsoft Support).
Microsoft has said it's adding controls for removing the OneDrive Photos experience itself, separate from the OneDrive app (Microsoft Support). Whether that same wave of updates eventually reaches a single favorited photo is an open question the support page doesn't answer yet. Checking that page again in a few months is the most reliable way to find out.
Comments
Be the first, drop a comment!