We are rapidly seeing cloud storage services come up with new photo storage features in a bid to win users over from their rivals. Its just one of the ways these services are trying to increase the number of users they have. Microsoft’s OneDrive team made a similar move today by announcing new photo features which includes a brand new search feature that’s going to make it much easier to locate your photos once they’re sent up in Microsoft’s cloud.
Uploading photos to OneDrive is easy enough. Mobile apps on iOS, Android and Windows Phone all support automatic backup of photos to OneDrive which provides all users with 30GB of free storage, that’s a seemingly never-ending amount of storage for casual smartphone photographers.
Starting in February OneDrive users on Windows 7 and Windows 9 will be able to automatically import photos from devices connected to their computers. Screenshots taken on the computer can be saved directly to OneDrive as well, and they’ll be saved to the clipboard like they always are. All of these photos will be stored in a new folder named “Camera imports.” Screenshots will go in their own separate folder.
The photo view has been enhanced to show photos grouped together by time and location, users can also see photos grouped by month. Albums is a completely new way of managing and sharing photos. They’re unlike traditional folders and put the images front and center by arranging the photos edge-to-edge in a collage. Clicking on a photo opens it up in full screen.
The OneDrive team has collaborated with their colleagues at Bing to improve search on OneDrive.com. Users can search for Office documents and PDFs by text inside them and photos based on location, time or text extracted from those images. Photos can also be searched through tags.
All of these new features are available on the web and iOS today. Android and Windows Phone apps will be updated soon as well.