by Nik Rawlinson
What you need: OneDrive account Time required: Minimum of one hour
Online storage providers want you to synchronise as much as you can. The more you upload to their servers, the more they can charge you for storage. Because you’re likely to upload your files and not touch them for years, the charges can roll over month to month, perhaps forever. No wonder they make it so easy to sync automatically.
Take Microsoft’s OneDrive as an example. Its software is built into Windows, and OneDrive is the default location for saving Microsoft Office files. The program also lets you sync your Desktop, Documents and Pictures folders ( 1 in our screenshot), save photos and videos from other devices 2 and automatically upload screenshots 3 . All of this is useful, but syncing a lot of files can push you towards the limits of your account, at which point you may need to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
But that’s not the only way you might end up using more space than you expect. Microsoft recently told some OneDrive users that from mid-October adding a photo to an album would mean it counts twice against their allocated storage, even though it exists only once. This won’t be such an issue for Microsoft 365 subscribers, who each get 1TB of storage, but it’s something to watch out for if you’re using the free 5GB tier.
OneDrive’s albums work a little like folders, in that they let you organise groups of pictures that share a theme – such as photos of your dog taken at different times, the best pictures of a particular trip through several countries, or your favourite shots of a place you’ve visited several times, which would otherwise be scattered chronologically throughout your library.
When you add a photo to an album, you don’t remove it from its original location, and neither do you create a duplicate: you just make it visible within a certain context. So, you can think of an album like a perforated grille, which blocks out all but the images that you’ve associated with it. Opening an album is like taking a bird’s-eye view at your entire library through that grille, so that only a subset of the pictures it contains remains visible.
It seems rather unfair, then, that an image you place in an album should count twice against your storage quota. Here, we explain how to avoid falling foul of OneDrive’s storage limits.
1 Add your own photo ta
