Using OneDrive: 5 tips for storing and sharing photos, videos and docs online

Microsoft created its cloud storage service, OneDrive, to allow people to "access, share and collaborate on your files from anywhere." Eighty-five percent of Fortune 500 companies and a quarter of a million organizations worldwide have OneDrive, according to Microsoft. While Google and Dropbox may have more individual users, for business, OneDrive is dominant.

The best thing about OneDrive may be how it allows you to work securely from any device: your desktop, laptop or on your phone through its mobile app. In terms of flexibility, OneDrive is powerful because in addition to supporting Office files, it is also compatible with more than 300 file types, from Photoshop files (PSD) and Illustrator (AI) to Adobe PDF and 3D image formats.

Here are our five successful OneDrive tips and tricks for agents:

Free version or included edition

OneDrive does not have to cost you anything. You can get its free version, with up to 5 gigabytes of storage at no cost. But since most of us use Office products, there's a better way to get OneDrive: with your Office 365 Personal edition ($69.99 a year) or Office 365 Home version ($99.99 a year).

Both of these versions come with 1 terabyte of storage. With the free version, you can store about 2500 photos. With the Office 365 versions – which also include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote online and installed versions – you can store 2 million photos.

There is one other option for 50 GB at $1.99 a month, but the best deal is getting OneDrive bundled with Office 365.

Set up automatic synching

OneDrive gives you the ability to sync all or some of your data between your computers and the cloud, giving you mobile access to all of your files on your smartphone. If you share your files for collaboration, OneDrive will automatically update the documents and synch automatically.

It's easy to do it on a Windows PC or Mac by clicking on the "cloud icon" in the taskbar, then Account > Choose Folders and either select all or just the folders you want to upload. For example, if you just want to use OneDrive to store all of your photos, you can designate just your photo folder(s) to be synchronized.

Auto-synching with OneDrive not only gives you mobile access to all your documents, photos and videos, but it gives you a backup of everything that's in the folders you are synching. That's an important feature if your computer were to ever crash.

And if you ever delete a photo by accident, fear not: you will probably find it online in the OneDrive Recycle bin! Finally, if you back up all your files, and the 1 terabyte plan makes this possible, you can protect your files from ransomware, as you will have a copy of everything on the cloud.

Sharing is caring

Sharing and collaborating are the strengths of a service like OneDrive or Google Docs. If you live in a Windows world, OneDrive will be very familiar to you, as it allows for easy sharing and collaboration of the most popular Microsoft programs, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It will track each change by the person's name so you can see who did what and when.

Sharing photos in OneDrive is a breeze and sharing a link that anyone can access without signing into a Microsoft or OneDrive account is a great feature and simple to do. You can share a file or photo in just two clicks: Just right click on the file you want to share in OneDrive and select "Share" and a menu will pop up to allow you to select "Email" to send the link and share that file or photo with one person or many!

Remember, the only folders or files people will see are the ones you share with them. If you don't share the file, bank-level encryption security protects all of your other documents from prying eyes.

Can't read a file? OneDrive probably can

Has anyone ever sent you an image file created in a software program you don't own so you can't open or view it? Go to your OneDrive account for the rescue! OneDrive can read hundreds of different file types so chances are that unless the file is corrupted, you will be able to view it in OneDrive.

Upload the file to OneDrive and then click on it and you should be able to preview the file in your web browser.

Better yet, OneDrive lets you view documents in a thumbnail image preview format, making it fast and easy to find documents you are looking for at a glance – especially images and photos.

Email that huge photo or video file

Some business emails limit the size of file attachments to 5 megabytes. Even Google has a limit of about 25 MB per email. What do you do when your file is too large?

Use OneDrive to use the power of your cloud storage to quickly share any photo or other files via email by creating a link. When someone clicks on that link, it automatically downloads the file to their device.

OneDrive gives you several ways to share files. The fastest way is when you are online viewing the file you want to share, just right click on it and select Share. A popup will allow you to create an email and send it from within the OneDrive app. But if your OneDrive account isn't connected to your work address, you probably want to select "Get Link." That will copy a link to the file in your Clipboard for you to paste into your work email and send it to someone to share.

There you have it—five ways to do more with OneDrive!

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