QoL: Custom Profile and Scene Collection location

[Hazno]

By default, these are stored in %appdata%\obs-studio (on PC), however, I would like to be able to choose where I want these files stored while keeping OBS installed in its default location. The reason for this is that I like to always keep an up-to-date backup (e.g. in Dropbox) of any changes made to my profile and scenes without having to manually export whenever I do some changes. This might seem lazy, but it's easy to forget (especially changes made during a live stream or when you're in a hurry), hence being a quality of life suggestion.

To solve this today, I'm using OBS in Portable Mode (with the portable_mode.txt file), and I'm keeping my entire OBS folder inside my Dropbox folder locally and running it from there. It works, but this presents two issues:

1. While the file size of OBS itself isn't particularly large, the obs-browser folder keeps increasing in size due to cookies and cache. I just checked my own OBS folder size, and it's currently sitting at 1.27 GB with the obs-browser folder currently sitting at ~850 MB. This requires maintenance because it's part of my allocated Dropbox (or any other backup solution) storage. This wouldn't matter as much if it was installed to its default location because I wouldn't have to keep my limited cloud backup storage in mind.
2. Some plugin installers struggle to work with OBS itself in custom locations. Elgato Stream Deck used to have this issue way back, and now Soundtrack by Twitch simply won't work as intended due to the custom location of my OBS. I've e-mailed back and forth with Twitch on this and helped them debug it to the best of my abilities, but as of now it's currently not supported. I have followed the steps to manually copy the plugin files into my custom OBS location, for your information. Leaving OBS in its default install location would solve this, but then I would have to continuously export my profile/scenes whenever I make any changes to make sure I won't lose anything in case something happens that requires a format of my Windows partition.

The option to set custom Profile and Scene Collection locations would be a huge QoL change to me (and hopefulle others) that would resolve these issues, and hopefully won't require a lot of work in order to make it work.

There are also other scenarios where this would be beneficial. Resetting Windows 10 will wipe the AppData folder, causing the loss of profiles and scene collections unless you know where to find them to restore them after said reset. Having read many posts about people losing their profiles and scene collections during a Windows reset or reinstall, simply being able to set a different location in their system for these files (e.g. a different drive/partition, or just a personal folder on the Windows partition even) would be a great quality of life change to mitigate that the latest changes they've made in OBS or even their entire profile/scene collection will be lost. Now I know this can be prevented by exporting before performing such a reset/reinstall, but many users won't even think about that before it's too late. Being presented with this option e.g. during the installation of OBS (and as an option in the OBS Advanced settings), they might think twice about it before proceeding.

Thank you for reading through all of this.

 

[rusty1]

I am also interested in an ability to change the default location of Scene Collections. I built a Scene Collection that is used by a few co-workers to broadcast on a daily basis. Every few days I update the scene collection file with new features, and I upload it to Google Drive. They have to manually import it within OBS or move it into their Scenes folder. But if they could change the default location of their Scene collection to be that location on google drive, they could open OBS and automatically have the new scene collection every time I post an update.

 

[Light Painter]

I had this issue as well, using Onedrive. I tried manually adding the entire Appdata folder to Onedrive and that was a disaster! A much better way is to just add the folder for obs-studio (within AppData\Roaming) to the Onedrive folder, as a Junction link. The easiest way to do this is using LSE - Link Shell Extension. It plugs in to Explorer so you can right click on an item (folder or file) and "Pick Link Source", then move to anywhere within your Onedrive folder (or perhaps Dropbox, not sure if it works the same way) and "Drop As.." - "Junction". Don't drop as a symbolic link because then Onedrive will copy only the link, not the contents, to the cloud.