13 uses of Onedrive that you may not have thought of

SkyDrive has been transformed: for a few weeks, has become OneDrive, but not only that, it has improved several of its features, it has made it even easier for it to become the center of your digital life and has made several functions that already existed even more robust.

It is, without a doubt, one of Microsoft's great services, and is available to users of most platforms and devices. For this reason, and because we always believe that you can get the most out of its many features, we show you thirteen ways to use it that may surprise you

1. Integrate your videos with Xbox

It doesn't matter if you have Xbox 360 or Xbox One: both have a OneDrive app and you can use it to connect to your account This is especially Interesting if you want to be able to watch movies from them without having to convert files, connect multimedia networks or anything other than accessing Wi-Fi from your console. Save your movies to a OneDrive folder and your consoles will even take care of converting the videos to what they need to play them at the very moment you want to see them.

2. Share videos that take into account the connection speed of those who view them

Although Skydrive already allowed you to share videos with other users, it did not take into account that the ideal quality to display them can vary depending on how different the connection of those who receive them is.For example, it did not make sense to treat a user who was with 3G the same as someone who is with a fiber speed of 100mb.

Now, OneDrive has changed the way shared videos are viewed and, finally, it will adapt the quality to the connection of each user This is, for example, what services like Youtube also do, and what makes it possible to watch these videos with fewer cuts and stops and consuming the data really necessary to every moment.

3. Automatically upload photos you take from any device

It doesn't matter if you have an iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Mac, PC, Windows RT tablet or Windows Phone smartphone. OneDrive has made it so you can automatically upload photos from all your devices from the moment you take them.You don't have to wait to give permission, or remember to do it every day, just activate the OneDrive function and let it take care of everything.

4. Put folders in your Windows Phone start menu

The OneDrive for Windows Phone update has also been a breath of fresh air compared to what Skydrive allowed you to do. For example, one of the most notable innovations requested by many users is the possibility of anchoring a specific folder from our OneDrive to the phone's home screen In this way In this way, we can have access to it from a Live Tile, “pinned” comfortably where we want.

5. Synchronize the heart of all your Windows

OneDrive achieves what was long hard to achieve: getting all your PCs in syncAnd no, I'm not just talking about what you see (the documents), but it also gets all the settings, the little details that make any PC “your own”. In Windows 8.1, the start screen, the applications installed, the data of those applications and all the bookmarks you have saved in Internet Explorer will always be the same on all your Windows devices.

Now you can move from one device to another without thinking “oh, I have to get this just how I like it first”. Also remember that you can choose to sync only when you're not on mobile connections, which will help keep data consumption under control.

6. Search within your photos

We have already seen that OneDrive automatically uploads all your photos from your different devices to the cloud so that you always have them available, even as a backup.Now, there is a part of this process that is especially beneficial if you are one of those who, instead of remembering everything, prefer that tools make it easier for you to find thingswhen you need them.

OneDrive allows you to search for the text inside the photos, whatever it is, so that looking in your Windows 8.1, you can see the specific photo in which it appears that text that you remember. What's more, if there are links, you can extract and copy the URL to your browser. They are the wonders of OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

7. Don't download everything to your local storage

One of the least known features of OneDrive, but at the same time one of the most beneficial is the one that allows us to synchronize our data between different devices without having to occupy all the space it would actually occupy Let's imagine a smartphone where space is more limited: what OneDrive does is that the user can always check what's inside their account... but don't completely download more than what that you really need.

Let's take, for example, the case of a folder full of photos. We want to review it from our phone and access the photos to search through them, but having them all stored there would possibly take up our smartphone's hard drive completely. What OneDrive does is quickly create thumbnails with which we can see what's in all the photos and search one by one. But only when we need it completely will it download it completely to the phone. And no, you don't have to do anything special: OneDrive behaves like this by default.

8. Send entire photo albums from OneDrive to Facebook

Sharing photos is very simple from OneDrive: you can share entire folders with your loved ones to use them as a family album, you can share the link so they can enjoy a slideshow of several of them... and you can also send albums integers from OneDrive to your Facebook account.

When you do, you can choose to put those photos in an album that already exists on Facebook or create a new one. You can also name it or choose who you are going to share it with (if public, if with your friends, if only with specific people). Without having left OneDrive, you will have the possibility to update your Facebook account with the best images.

9. Attach pictures to your Outlook emails directly from OneDrive

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If you have your documents on OneDrive and use it as your primary storage drive, there will surely come a time when you need to use one of them as an attachment. Doing it from OneDrive is extremely easy. Just click on the icon Insert>"

• Files as attachments: the traditional method.
• Embedded images: to put images inside your emails so they can be seen there, not appear as files at the end of the text.
• Share from OneDrive.

By clicking on the latter, your initial OneDrive folder will appear on the screen and you will be able to choose what you need. Without searching your hard drive and by linking directly to the OneDrive document, so the recipient can also view it from any browser.

10. Collaborate in real time in Office

We already told you that new airs had come to Office Online thanks to its integration with OneDrive. And, without a doubt, the main one is the one that allows us to work in real time on our documents with several users, regardless of whether some are on one device and others are on another. For the first time, Desktop Office users will be able to work at the same time so Office Online users and everyone else will see in real time what changes are being made .

eleven. Use it as a backup of your instagram photos

Are you an Instagram user? If so, you will have many photos uploaded to the social network, photos to which you will have a Special love. But... did you know that you can also have them on your OneDrive? That's right: for this you have to use IFTTT, a website that allows you to connect different services so that they do tasks automatically every time something happens.

In this case, we can ask IFTTT that every time you upload a photo to Instagram, it is automatically saved as a backup in a specific folder on your OneDrive. What's more, you don't even have to worry about understanding how IFTTT works: other users have already created the specific recipe for this and you just have to click on it to make it work.

12. Automate the backup of your digital life

If the above seemed like a good idea to you, the truth is that joining IFTTT and OneDrive can become the best way to capture all your digital life and never stop being available on your own hard drive or in your personal digital storage.Because yes, we are in many web services, but have you thought about what will happen the day they disappear? Or when you want to search for a specific photo and it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack?

It's okay, you can automate almost anything with IFTTT and the OneDrive channel. I leave you some recipes that could fit you:

• Save all attachments that arrive to your gmail account in OneDrive
• Save any song from Soundcloud directly to your OneDrive
• Take all your Flickr photos to your folders
• Get every time you're tagged in a Facebook photo, it's saved to OneDrive
• Keep all your YouTube videos on OneDrive
• Keep your Foursquare photos forever in your personal storage
• Sync your entire Dropbox (or just a specific folder) with OneDrive
• Save your Pocket bookmarks as a PDF

There are many more recipes to discover, so here it is the imagination that sets the limits of how you are going to automate your OneDrive.

13. Earn more free space

Satisfied with the free 7GB OneDrive gives you but still want more free space? Take advantage of the different ways that Microsoft offers you to achieve it:

• One of them is installing the applications for mobile devices and activating the automatic upload of photos. That will get you 3GB more.
• In addition, you can invite friends to join OneDrive. This way it will not only be much easier to share anything with them, but for each new friend you will receive 500MB more up to a maximum of 5GB extra.

Go ahead and start living the OneDrive experience!

Welcome to Windows 8: