Announcements continue to roll out about the changes coming to OneDrive. Today, we’ll look at what’s coming with OneDrive Photos and Music.

 OneDrive Photos

Probably most of us have photos in our OneDrive.  You hopefully are sharing these photos with a link to friends and family instead of sending them via email. With the OneDrive sync engine, it’s easy to organize your photos (making folders and moving photos around), either from the web or from your Windows Explorer and it syncs up pretty quickly. After I’ve taken photos on my phone and need to have them on my OneDrive, they show up within minutes, both on my hard drive and on the web.

So what is coming with OneDrive? From the OneDrive Blog, these changes will be coming probably before mid-March, 2015:

• The ability for customers to curate photos from their phone, desktop and inbox quickly and simply
• A feature that allows you to view, manage, and share photos with Albums; and finally,
• through a partnership with Bing, customers can now search for their files and photos in a new and exciting way!

Having an Android or iOS phone or device means you will be fully supported and be able to use all of these features. Microsoft has been really focusing on upgrading the experience of other platforms—in fact they will usually delay these upgrades for Windows Phone users and focus on the two major phone platforms.

The ability to curate, or choose certain photos quickly will be nice. Right now, most of us probably MMS (text) photos, one at a time. A feature that allows us to quickly gather a series of photos together, perhaps create an album on the fly and then easily share them is very convenient. If I want to share photos, I usually wait until I get to a device with a keyboard rather than my phone or tablet. I really like being able to see things from a larger screen and having the ability to use a keyboard. It’s so much faster and efficient to me. I realize that people under 35 use their phones more extensively. Working with a smaller screen and using an on-screen keyboard is fine with them. My daughter writes 3-500 word emails on her Android phone!

OneDrive Music, Playlists and Streaming

I heard about this feature on a recent podcast and really can’t find too much about it since it’s not available just yet. But YES, finally, we will be able to move our iTunes playlists, music and albums and be able to listen or stream our music from OneDrive and a Music App.

 

From Rod Trent and the Supersite for Windows:

“Along with one of the upcoming Windows 10 Builds, Microsoft will finally flip the switch to allow the Windows Music app to work with music and playlists stored in OneDrive. With many already taking advantage of unlimited storage in OneDrive, this will be a hugely welcome and valuable feature. And, while the new feature was used as part of the Windows 10 excitement, this ability should also be available for the Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 Music app.”

He also said a OneDrive ‘Music’ folder showed up in all our OneDrive’s last fall (I checked mine and sure enough, it is there). Microsoft has a Music app now and those of us with that will soon be able to transfer all our iTunes playlists and music into OneDrive. Being able to transfer playlists is a huge thing to many of us. We’ve spent a lot of time building them and we certainly don’t want to go through that effort again.

I have had several iPods and have quite a bit of music on them, however, I rarely listen to music from my iPod. I do have some books on tape (like The Hobbit, and The Lord of The Rings), that I listen to quite frequently and that is one of the main reasons I still have my iPod. I’ll have to do a post one of these days on how and why I quit iTunes and now listen to all my netcasts either on my Windows Phone or my Zune.  So I was glad to see this feature will be coming and I will definitely be taking advantage of that.

So these are just two things that are upcoming with OneDrive. It seems that Microsoft is investing ‘all in’ with OneDrive and we should continue to enjoy upgrades. So do either of these improvements make you want to use OneDrive more? What’s your go-to storage software?