OneDrive free up space with Python

I have been using OneDrive to store a large amount of images and now I need to process those, so I have sync'd my OneDrive folder to my computer, which takes relatively no space on disk. However, since I have to open() them in my code, they all get downloaded, which would take much more than the available memory on my computer. I can manually use the Free up space action in the right-click contextual menu, which keeps them sync'd without taking space.

I'm looking for a way to do the same thing but in my code instead, after every image I process.

Trying to find how to get the commands of contextual menu items led me to these two places in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

However I couldn't find anything related to it and those trees have way too many keys to check blindly. Also this forum post (outside link) shows a few ways to free up space automatically, but it seems to affect all files and is limited to full days intervals.

So is there any way to either access that command or to free up the space in python ?

Solution

According to this microsoft post it is possible to call Attrib.exe to do that sort of manipulation on files.

This little snippet does the job for a per-file usage. As shown in the linked post, it's also possible to do it on the full contents of a folder using the /s argument, and much more.

import subprocess

def process_image(path):
    # Open the file, which downloads it automatically
    with open(path, 'r') as img:
        print(img)

    # Free up space (OneDrive) after usage
    subprocess.run('attrib +U -P "' + path + '"')

The download and freeing up space are fairly quick, but in the case of running this heavily in parallel, it is possible that some disk space will be consumed for a short amount of time. In general though, this is pretty instantaneous.