Microsoft Releases New SkyDrive Features, Timeline And Filmstrip Views And Photo Upload Speed

Microsoft announced on Monday new features and improvements for their SkyDrive cloud storage service, with a specific attention to photos. The updates can be found starting now, but you may very well not see them for approximately 48 hours as Microsoft is rolling them out gradually.

Arguably the greatest new feature is the brand new photos timeline view. The key idea listed here is to provide you with a method to see your entire SkyDrive photos across all of your albums and folders centered on when these were taken.

Here is the feature in action (you can navigate to a particular month simply by selecting its name):

To navigate through all of the images, that are organized into groups by event and time, all you need is to scroll. This view can be obtained from your own browser, though we assume Microsoft will ultimately provide it in the SkyDrive apps going forward.

There's also a fresh filmstrip view, which allows you to breeze through photos in a slideshow:

Lastly, the thumbnails view has been enhanced as well. Microsoft has also included new thumbnails for Word files and PowerPoint:

GUI changes aside, Microsoft has enhanced the performance of photo uploads to SkyDrive. The Redmond-based organization tinkered the SkyDrive desktop application and its server code to boost upload times by 2-3 times. They are tests on the basis of the Microsoft's internal tests, so expect your experience to vary.

Last, although not least, this Thursday Microsoft finally switched on Windows Phone 8 max-resolution camera upload for several available markets. That is for both photos and videos, and means Windows Phone users may have a whole backup of all photos they shoot in their SkyDrive camera roll.

Microsoft is increasingly facing competition from popular services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Emphasizing photos is important in the cloud storage race, as users seem most enthusiastic about using such services to store and share all of their photos.

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