Microsoft recently increased the amount of OneDrive space for free users, and drastically lowered its prices for extra storage. Starting next month, free OneDrive accounts will be increased to 15 GB and Office 365 subscribers get a 1 TB included with the subscription.
For more details on the announcement from Microsoft this week, read: Microsoft Doubles Free OneDrive Storage to 15 GB and Beyond .
With the increase in OneDrive storage, there’s no reason not to store your photos directly to OneDrive. As smartphones continue to evolve, so do the cameras. And they can shoot high resolution photos and video, and the raw uncompressed files are fairly large, and the more you take, the more storage space you need.
OneDrive isn’t just a proprietary thing for Windows OS and Windows Phone 8. OneDrive is cross-platform and works on Android devices and the iPhone and iPad too.
Storing Photos to OneDrive On Windows Phone
If you’re a Windows Phone 8.1 owner, you’ll be asked to back up photos (and other phone data) to OneDrive during the initial set up. To make sure everything is being backed up to OneDrive, and the quality of your backed up photos, go to Settings > Backup > photos + videos. There you have a few options on what you want the quality to be. I always change mine to Best quality for both, and because the file sizes will be larger, Windows Phone will upload them only when you’re connected to Wi-Fi.
Store Photos to OneDrive by Default from Android or iOS
First we’ll start with Android. Download and install the OneDrive app for Android [1] . When you initially set it up, it will ask you if you want to back up full-resolution photos and videos to OneDrive automatically. Go ahead and turn it on. By default, they will only upload over Wi-Fi, but you can change that if you want for some reason. Oh, and you automatically get an extra 3 GB of space added. So, with OneDrive doubling its space for free users next month to 15 GB â€" you’ll be rocking 18 instead. Cool.
One thing to keep in mind when enabling this on Android, your Google+ and Photos apps might already be automatically backing up photos to Google Drive too. But if you’d rather make OneDrive your one and only central location you can. Like OneDrive, when you initially set up Google+ it and the photos app asks if you want to turn Auto Backup on or not.
If you’ve been a long time user, you probably have this enabled. Just go into Settings in each app to turn it off.
Moving along to iOS, you need to download the OneDrive app [2] which works on both the iPhone and iPad. The first time you launch it on your iOS device (iPad in the shot below), it gives you the options to automatically save all of your pictures to OneDrive. By default it will only upload your photos and video when you’re connected to Wi-Fi. It’s probably the best choice to leave it that way, so you don’t get overage charges on your data plan.
Note: The iOS OneDrive app allows an extra 3 GB of storage too. However, it looks like this trick only worked after I added it to Android.
If you already have OneDrive App Installed and want to save your photos to OneDrive launch it and go to Settings > Options > Camera Backup and turn it on. When you upload pictures at full quality, you can choose to download them from OneDrive resized for faster downloads, but keep in mind at a lesser quality â€" of course the file size will also be less, which, again helps with limited data plans.
There you go! Now all of the photos you take and videos you record will automatically be saved to the OneDrive Camera Roll folder. If you’re confused at first, the Camera Roll folder with all of you backed up pictures, from all of your smartphones and tablets is in OneDrive > Pictures > Camera Roll. And for easier access, I recommend pinning the Camera Roll folder to your Start screen on your phone. And on your Windows 8.1 PC you might want to pint it to the Start screen and create shortcuts as well.
Final Thoughts
The benefit of using OneDrive on your smartphone(s) and table(s) versus iCloud or Google Drive is you can actually view and organize you photos from more locations and devices. For example, OneDrive was added to Xbox 360 and Xbox One so you can see you them there. You can access your photos from any device that supports OneDrive. And, if your device doesn’t have a OneDrive app, you can always access it from the web.
On your computer, you have a couple of ways to view and manage your flies. You can use OneDrive on your desktop to get the File Explorer type management system, or use the Modern app version on http://www.groovypost.com/tags/windows-8/ . The Modern version is especially helpful if you have a device running Windows RT.
Another thing worth mentioning is that OneDrive makes it easy to share your files to anyone securely. Also, at the time of this writing, the OneDrive apps for Android and iOS were updated [3] to included stability, reliability, and some subtle but helpful new features. Including integration with Office 365 on iOS.
Links
- ^ OneDrive Android (play.google.com)
- ^ OneDrive app (itunes.apple.com)
- ^ OneDrive mobile Updates (winsupersite.com)
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