Onedrive Is Getting Better Photo Management, Faster Performance, and More

Microsoft’s OneDrive is receiving a major update that will allow you to “work smarter, stay organized, and relive life’s best moments—all through the magic of AI,” the company announced Tuesday.

With the update, you’ll be able to build and deploy a Copilot Agent, a custom, project-based AI assistant fine-tuned on your relevant files, documents, and OneDrive data. They’re similar in scope toChatGPT’s GPT applets, though built for specific in-organization tasks rather than, say, dispensing plant care advice. The Agent can help automate repetitive processes as well as respond to natural language prompts and questions about the project it was built for. For example, one could be used to get new team members through the onboarding process more quickly and completely than having HR manually send over the necessary site links and documents. The Agent can also be shared across teams and platforms, including Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint.

Copilot is also coming to OneDrive directly, and is now available to all commercial customers. With Copilot in OneDrive, you can have the AI quickly summarize the key information from multiple files without having to open each one individually, as well as autonomously generate a FAQ from those files to share with other stakeholders and answer natural language questions about their contents.

OneDrive itself should see a significant performance improvement. “From browsing large libraries to filtering documents, everything is faster, smoother, and more responsive,” VP of Product for OneDrive, Jason Moore, wrote in the announcement post.

You’ll also (finally) be able to change the color of file folders within File Explorer. The file management system is even receiving new filter controls to help you find what you’re looking for faster and more easily. The company is revamping file sharing capabilities as well. You’ll soon be able to see real-time updates about which team member is working on which file and include expiration dates to sharing links for added security.

Those filter controls have started rolling out to users and are expected to be available to all commercial customers by the end of this year. Starting in the middle of 2025, Microsoft plans to make “significant improvements” to the document library interface, “improving the overall performance and reliability, making it easier and faster to navigate, switch to and create custom views, and filter large data sets,” Moore wrote.

The OneDrive Android and iOS apps are getting some love with this update and will now focus on delivering a “photos-first mobile experience.” Similar to Google’s Gemini-enhanced Photo’s app, OneDrive mobile will enable users to quickly search their image library using natural language prompts and descriptions of the photo’s content. The company is also leveraging AI to expand the types of memories OneDrive surfaces. The revamped mobile app is available now on Android devices and will arrive for iOS in November.

Source: Microsoft