Because why not? It seems like every software that has social elements built is in getting stories nowadays. And OneDrive is in no mood to get left behind in this craze.
Microsoft has announced that the cloud storage service is getting stories very soon.
This feature will be termed as photos stories, and will allow you to share photos and videos that you host on the service with family and friends. They will be able to interact with your content via both reacts and comments.
Of course, this is not a new concept for Microsoft, with the company recently announcing this feature for the Xbox app that now lets you share gameplay moments with those in your gaming circle.
On OneDrive, it will also be possible to customize a photo story by not only changing your Microsoft Account name and picture, but an option to set a cover photo and description for your story will also be available.
Once you share a story, it will show up in the Shared tab on the OneDrive of your followers.
Obviously, several privacy focused features will be built right from the start. You will have the option of removing access for people or even delete photo stories via dedicated options. It looks like Redmond wants to fully cook this feature before making it available to users.
One another important point here is that these stories are designed to be private, and will not show up in search engines.
OneDrive photos stories do not take up extra space, as you would imagine. That’s because you can only share images and clips that are stored on OneDrive. That said, if you delete a photo that is being used in a story, a copy will still remain in the cloud and count towards your storage usage.
Microsoft touts the lack of ads as a major selling point for this new feature, and the company also highlights that you don’t need to have a premium subscription in order to use it.
Photo stories are currently supported on the following plans: The free OneDrive Basic with 5 GB of storage, OneDrive Standalone 100 GB, Microsoft 365 Personal, and Microsoft 365 Family.
Work and school accounts are not supported right now.
The software titan has made this new feature available as a public preview in Australia only for the time being, but it will arrive in the US and other countries later this year. What we don’t have right now is a timeline for general availability.
Should be soon.
