Disable OneDrive Cloud Icons in Navigation Pane in Windows 10

The recent Windows 10 version features new icons for your OneDrive locations pinned to the navigation pane of File Explorer. The new icons reflect the synchronization state of the folder along with its on-demand state. If you are not happy to see these extra icons, it is easy to disable them.

The new icons in the navigation pane are connected with OneDrive's Files on-Demand. These are not overlays but shown next to the folder icon. This is how they look:

"Files on-demand" is a feature which can display placeholder versions of online files in your local OneDrive directory even if they were not synchronized and downloaded. As you may already know, the Files On-Demand feature is not a part of the operating system. It is a feature of the bundled OneDrive software in Windows 10.

Once the Files on Demand feature is enabled, File Explorer will show the following overlay icons for files in the cloud.

These are online files only, which are not stored on your computer.

File placeholders will have the following icon.

When you open such a file, OneDrive will download it to your device and make it locally available. You can open a locally available file anytime, even without internet access.

Finally, the following overlay icon will be used for always-available files.

Only the files that you mark as "Always keep on this device" have a green circle with a white check mark. These files will always be available even when you're offline. They are downloaded to your device and take up space on your disk drive.

In the Explorer navigation pane for folders under Quick Access, icons to indicate the status appear as well. Here is how to disable them.

To disable OneDrive Cloud Icons in the navigation pane, do the following.

1. Open This PC in File Explorer.
2. In the Ribbon user interface of Explorer, click File -> Change folder and search options.If you have disabled the Ribbon using a tool like Winaero Ribbon Disabler, press F10 -> click Tools menu - Folder Options.
3. Tip: You can add the Folder Options button to Quick Access Toolbar. See the following article: How to add any ribbon command to the Quick Access toolbar of File Explorer.
4. Switch to the View tab in File Explorer options and disable the option Always show availability status under Navigation pane.

You are done.

If you need to change this option with a Registry tweak, this is also possible. Follow the instructions below.

Disable OneDrive cloud icons with a Registry tweak

1. Open the Registry Editor app.
2. Go to the following Registry key.

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

   See how to go to a Registry key with one click.

3. On the right, modify or create a new 32-Bit DWORD value NavPaneShowAllCloudStates.
   Note: Even if you are running 64-bit Windows you must still create a 32-bit DWORD value.
   Set its value data to 0 in to disable the icons.
4. To make the changes done by the Registry tweak take effect, you need to sign out and sign in again to your user account. Alternatively, you can restart the Explorer shell.

The value data of NavPaneShowAllCloudStates can be as follows:
1 - Icons are enabled. This is the default value.
0 - Icons are disabled.

Here are ready-to-use Registry files:

Download Registry Files

That's it.