Microsoft is preparing to release a fresh OneDrive app for Windows next year that will include a photo gallery, people view, AI-powered slideshows and editing features. He is part of many new features available in OneDrive in the coming months, including a fresh photo agent and AI-powered mobile editing.
The fresh OneDrive app for Windows is a major redesign compared to the existing desktop app. Instead of a miniature flyout menu on the taskbar, it’s a full app that looks much more like the OneDrive mobile app. It includes a fresh gallery view of all your cloud photos and a dedicated people view that detects faces in photos and lets you name them.
OneDrive on Windows will soon also work with local photos, allowing you to edit images and then store them locally on disk or upload them to Microsoft’s cloud storage service.
Microsoft is also adding even greater Copilot integration with OneDrive with a fresh Photo Agent that will be available to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers. It’s sort of like a photo chatbot, thanks to which you can ask for a collection of vacation photos or recall specific moments in time. Copilot will then find the photos and allow you to create albums as well.
OneDrive for iOS and Android will also soon get a mobile AI edition with the ability to transform photos into animated styles. You can easily remove blurry or duplicate photos on the mobile app. A fresh moments tab has also launched, displaying older photos and memories “from that day”.
Microsoft has also rolled out a major update to the way OneDrive users share documents. The fresh “master link” feature means you can simply copy the URL of a OneDrive document, rather than sharing special links with other people. It works identically to how Google Docs has been doing for years and finally makes it easier for users to request access to files instead of receiving a pesky access denied message.