OneDrive is an app that helps you keep your digital documents, photos and videos organized.
1. If you use the Microsoft suite of office products – Excel, Word, Outlook and Power Point – you probably already have access to 1 TB of storage in OneDrive. And 1 TB is a lot (about 500,000 photos!) Microsoft 365 is about $90/year and includes 1 TB of storage in One Drive.
2. OneDrive can be installed on PCs or MACs and while it is intended for business teams to collaborate on files and documents, it is becoming much more photo friendly.
3. OneDrive saves your photos in full resolution; they do not compress your images.
4. OneDrive keeps your metadata attached – all the information recorded by the camera like the capture date and any geotagging as well as any metadata you’ve added like tags or keywords. 5. OneDrive offers an app for our phones (iPhone and Android) so when we take a picture it is automatically uploaded to the site and stored in our collection. This copy acts as a backup copy of the picture on your phone. If you delete the picture on your phone by accident, it doesn’t change the copy in OneDrive.
6. OneDrive will also AUTOMATICALLY re-name your photo from img3456 to the date it was taken. This is a huge step in organizing photo collections and OneDrive does it for us! This new name stays with the photo when you download it so it’s easy to organize these images later.
7. OneDrive will let you organize your photos into Albums. They have an image recognition feature to make your photos searchable by tags like Outdoors, Sports and Restaurants. It also lets you search by the tags and keywords you’ve manually added to your photos.
8. OneDrive allows you to upload your photos from different locations – more than one phone, more than one computer.
9. OneDrive protects your privacy without having to change any confusing or complicated settings.
10. Getting your photos out of OneDrive is easy. They don’t compress your images or strip the metadata so when you download a photo from the site you get back exactly what you uploaded to begin with. Actually, it’s better if it was uploaded from your phone as it’s been re-named to the capture date! Automatically uploading your iPhone photos to OneDrive then downloading them from OneDrive to your computer is much easier than trying to transfer them from your phone to the PC.
11. The Microsoft 365 Family account allows up to 6 individuals to share their photos to the account with 6 TB of storage space. That’s huge!
12. OneDrive allows files up to 250 GB to be loaded. That means we can store even our big videos there!
OneDrive Photos Wishlist:
I used OneDrive to back up the photos on my phone this year. It worked great but I do have a few things on my wish list:
1. Better customer support so we could have found someone to help me connect my husband’s personal OneDrive account on his business phone. We think having a business OneDrive account on his phone was the issue.
2. Better search functionality within photos. It has been updated in the last little while so I think it’s on its way, but it would be nice to be able to key in the word “dog” and have AI pull all the photos with dogs in them.
3. OneDrive does not work with iCloud to upload full size versions of optimized photos on your phone. You will need to either uncheck optimize storage on your iPhone and wait for full size images to download before uploading to OneDrive or upload full resolution images another way.
4. OneDrive uploads new photos as you take them, it does not go back and upload (and rename and sort) all the photos in your camera roll. You will have to upload them another way.
5. OneDrive does not connect directly to an external hard drive attached to your computer. Uploads and downloads have to take place through the computer itself.
As with any cloud service remember that we are using their service and that they can change this service at any time. Be sure to keep another copy of your photos and videos in a different location.