SharePoint Document Library limit of 5000 - Ridiculous
We planned to migrate from Dropbox to a SharePoint document library and when implemented, we immediately hit the 5000 item limit in a library. This is ridiculous in 2018. We have used folders with over 35,000 files on Dropbox without any issues. This is an unfortunate limit for a product that is called Office365 for business.
Please increase this limit or provide another means to load and backup large datasets.

24 comments
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J .Feyen commented
We also hit the 5000 item limit. 5000 items is peanuts for a cloud solution. Really big bug, please fix Microsoft.
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anonimo commented
It is not user friendly this limit..please Microsoft to resolve
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chiara polyamour commented
i have uploaded a genericcsolution to overcome the 5000 limit
https://gist.github.com/chiarapolyamour/75e10d7d30b049f681d1dbced3668e1e -
Lawrence McKay commented
Please fix this as the item count is way to small.
Sorry of makes onedrive unusable -
Renato commented
This is how you get to lose a customer.
I think that 5000 items is really to small of an index to live withI created indexed columns to fit my needs and even with that, I get many errors
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ng-lb commented
This is causing me all kinds of hell recently, I've been able to replicate the RenderListDataAsStream calls that SP uses, though I don't get a whole page.
I load pages of 100 items at a time, from a list with 13k+- items, though when ordered and filtered, sometimes I get no results for page 1, but then matched results for page 2. Whereas the SP interface gets all of them on the first request.
It seems to order and filter against batches of 5000 items with each page request, sometimes a page request returns nothing, then the next page returns matches.
So e.g. when my webpart loads the first page, I get a single item, then when I load a second page I get no items, then the third page gets like 30 matches.Even when directly requesting list data as a stream, it seems like the "stream" part was just slapped on top of the same SQL queries used for regular AJAX etc. so still suffers from the 5000 item limit.
Looks like, if I want to sort, filter and page an SP List of over 5k items, in a WebPart rendered within our SP interface, there is no officially supported way to do that.
Instead I'll have to engineer some kind of progressive request system, so we keep making requests until we either have at least 100 items, or we reach the end of the list.
Anyone know how I can make this request?
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Lionel Lejeune commented
@Chris
No, indexing is not enough, your have to filter every view to ensure that there will never be more than 5K results in a view, even if it is paged.
And even like that, you'll have plenty of restrictions on your list. -
Chris commented
All you need to do is index your list columns. You can store millions of files in a given list. The 5K limit is not individual items but the amount of items the list can query per view. You need to manage your list better by creating views, indexing, and controlling metadata to ensure you can store and retrieve the amount of items you want from your lists per view.
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Fabian Medina commented
Ridiculous! This should be resolved ASAP!
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Paolo commented
It's an index limit. Not a file limit.
You can have millions of files but remember that SP has a DB on the backend. Each item is indexed x number of columns x other info etc. The 5000 index limit is set to maintain performance. There's nothing stopping you from adding more files.
Unfortunately, in Sharepoint online, this is non-negotiable and have tried to wrestle with it myself.
If you're having space issues, you can increase the space limits under your Office365 admin portal > Sharepoint
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Frank commented
I generate 3500 files of the same kind a year and I am not able to have them in the same view. Not even with a group function. Ridiculous.
My system generates in one measurment 8000 files. I am not able to hot them together in a folder on SharePoint. Ridiculous.
I have to stay on a local server till this issue is fixed. -
Anonymous commented
Yes, I agree it is ridiculous. The limit should be higher or maintainable by the admin.
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Mark Ernst commented
It IS ridiculous. It's just a really ****** service of Microsoft to be offering a TB of space, limited to 5.000 items. You can never use that TB of space with that small amount of files. I have 259.000 files and it's still not a TB.
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Matthias Fleschütz commented
+3 votes for this and thanks for that appealing title @Rodney
Same use case here...plan to migrate from Dropbox to SharePoint.
At least one document library has ~25000 files with 6.300 elements.At this point I don't wanna think about migrating our internal fileservers to Sharepoint doc libraries...
-1 of my votes as there seems to be only partial limits:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-large-lists-and-libraries-in-sharepoint-b8588dae-9387-48c2-9248-c24122f07c59?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US tells
"You can store up to 30 million items or files in a SharePoint list or library. Filtered views of large lists have a similar experience to other lists. However, when a list view shows more than 5000 items, you may run into a list view threshold error. Follow one or all of the three steps below to update your list when you do."So it seems that it works for those libraries, but you will get problems in lists / filters / indexes.
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Jordan commented
Here it is 2019 and this feature has not been added. This is a must as a lot of corporation have folders that contain over 5k documents
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Trevor commented
I agree, this limitation is very restrictive and unnecessary. I also feel such a limitation should be documented well in the marketing materials. Their advertisements of "up to 30 million items" is very misleading.
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Anonymous commented
The limitation is a real problem so Microsoft please help your faithful customers
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Anonymous commented
This is much needed feature and this screwed up many sites after the migration and still many of them does not work with the workarounds. This is bad design and bad planning.
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Prakash Gupta commented
Please provide the option to change thersold limit, so that we can decide as per our requirement
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xMarcus commented
I have libraries on prem with ~140,000 items. I have lifted the list view threshold to 150,000 items. This is not that taxing on SQL server or the WFE. It takes a couple seconds to open a folderless view (flat list) of a library with 148,000 files. People are accepting of this because they realize there are nearly 150,000 files and they are fine with a 2-3 second wait. (probably would be 5-6 seconds in SharePoint online). Note, when opening a regular folder view of the same library it doesn’t take any longer than usual.
If Microsoft raises the limit and people see the minor slowdown in large libraries/views, they will have an understanding of why with some simple explanation. They are then enabled to decide between a minor performance hit or the pain of reorganizing their content. The important point here is the customer is not limited, they are empowered to decide for themselves.
Now for another angle. No competing document management system has such a constraining limitations. Without removing these barriers I'm afraid Microsoft is going to continue losing large amounts of customers to Box, G-Suite, and others.
Finally OneDrive (sharepoint mysites) don't have this problem, so why stick it in SharePoint? Or am I to conclude OneDrive is no longer using a SQL back end?