Microsoft is informing OneDrive customers currently about a planned change that may have a significant impact on storage quotas. From October 16, 2023 on, photos uploaded to OneDrive may count twice against the storage quota.
The change does not affect OneDrive customers who just upload photos to the cloud storage service, but it affects users who use the optional albums feature.
All photos uploaded to OneDrive are stored in the Gallery by default. Microsoft has encouraged users of its Windows operating systems to enable OneDrive syncing of photos, but the feature is also available on other platforms.
These size of the uploaded image files counts against the storage quota of the account. Users who use the albums feature will have the same photos counted against their storage quota again soon.
Albums is an optional feature that OneDrive customers may use to create custom collections of photos and images on the site.
To use the albums feature, OneDrive users may load
https://photos.onedrive.com/ directly in their preferred web browser. All images uploaded to OneDrive are displayed after authentication on the page.
Albums are created or updated by selecting images in the main Gallery and then selecting the "add to album" option that becomes available. One of the main advantages of albums, besides organizing photos into groups, is the share functionality that Microsoft baked into the feature.
A family could upload their vacation photos to OneDrive, create an album with highlights, and then share access to that album with family members, relatives and friends.
