Is Microsoft OneDrive Photos catching up to Google Photos?

I am a fan of Google Photos and think it is a brilliant service. However, Microsoft Photos on OneDrive is getting pretty good. and it can automatically detect the type of content and tag photos.

Microsoft OneDrive is built into Windows 10, but it supports other versions of Windows, macOS on the Apple Mac, Android phones and tablets and the iPhone and iPad. There is an app for almost everything and it can be accessed through a web browser too.

New users get 5GB of online storage, but if you have been with Microsoft services for a few years, you could well have earned bonuses to give you up to 40GB for free.

Extra storage is reasonably priced when you consider that Microsoft Office is bundled with it and you can get up to 5TB if you need it.

Add photos to OneDrive

Photos should be stored in the OneDrive Pictures folder and it should be created if you don’t already have one.

OneDrive can be accessed using Explorer on the PC or an app on the Mac, phones and tablets. Just copy your photos to the Pictures folder on the PC and Mac, or upload them from your phone. There is an option in the mobile app to automatically upload photos from the camera, which is useful.

You need the extra storage of a paid account because 5GB is easily filled with photographs.

Related: Clean up your photo library and clear out the duplicates

Browse your photos

You can, of course, browse your photos on the PC in the OneDrive folder on the disk drive because it is synced with OneDrive online storage. However, you can also open a web browser and go to OneDrive, then select Photos on the left. This has advantages.

Up in the top right corner, click Show photos from and the options are All folders and Pictures folder. Select Pictures folder to exclude images you may have elsewhere, such as work images in the Documents folder.

It is usually best to look at just the photos in the Pictures folder.

Configure photo options

There are some useful photo options that should be set up to make organising and finding photos on OneDrive easier. Click the gear icon in the top right corner and select Options.

Select Photos on the left and there is an option to automatically create albums when photographs are uploaded. Turn it on.

Select Tagging on the left and Allow OneDrive to automatically tag photos by theme. What this means is that OneDrive will scan photos and attempt to determine the subject of the image. It then automatically creates tags and adds them to the photos.

There is a bit of AI going on here and it can tell a photo of a car from a photo of a cat and add the appropriate tags.

Explore photos by tag

Return to the Photos main screen and click Tags at the top. The tags that OneDrive has automatically assigned to photos are displayed on thumbnail images. Click a tag and photos with that tag are displayed.

The results are quite good, but I think that Google’s AI for detecting the content of photos is better. OneDrive often gets the tags right and will add #animal or #cat to cat photos, #beach to beach photos, #car to photos with cars in, and so on. However, it does get some photos wrong.

A winter landscape was thought to be beach and part of a train was thought to be a car. Most tags are good though.

Tags can be searched for and when typing into the search box, matching tags are suggested. Click a tag to show all photos with it.

If a photo has one or more wrong tags, select the photo by ticking it in the top right corner of the thumbnail and then click the i button in the top right corner to open the information panel on the right. Click the cross next to tags that do not apply.

There is also an Edit tags link that enables tags to be added by clicking them in a list or by typing in a new tag name.

A problem with tags is that all images on OneDrive are tagged. Photos outside of the Pictures folder are included and this may be a problem for some people.

For example, I have hundreds of screenshots and images for this website and other projects backed up on OneDrive and OneDrive has tagged them all. Many images have tags that are wrong or unnecessary and it is a bit of a disorganised mess.

Unlike the photos view, which can be limited to images in the Pictures folder, the tags cannot be limited to just the Pictures folder. There does not seem to be a way of bulk clearing tags, which would also be useful. I would like to select a tag and delete all occurrences for example.

If the only images on OneDrive are photos you have taken with your camera, the automatic tagging is quite good. It is not perfect, but is right more often than it is wrong.

Explore places

Select Places at the top and photos are organised by location. Take photos with the camera in your phone and GPS location information is automatically stored with each photo. OneDrive Photos clearly reads this data and knows exactly where each photo is taken. This enables photos to be grouped by location.

Click a location and all the photos taken at that place are displayed. Select a photo and in the information panel on the right is a map showing exactly where the photo was taken.

OneDrive Photos vs Google Photos

This is no contest and Google is a long way ahead of Microsoft in terms of features, identifying content and automatically applying special effects to images.

For example, Google automatically creates a People and Pets category and clicking a face enables you to see every photo that person appears in. It has even included my cat and it shows the photos he appears in when I click it. I haven’t told Google Photos I have a cat and it obviously deduced that it is mine from the photos it appears in.

OneDrive has some catching up to do before it is as good as Google photos, but the service is definitely improving and while it may not be perfect, it is quite good.

Gone are the days when you had to laboriously tag photos to organise them and now it is mostly automatic. Some tweaking is still necessary when tags are wrong, but mostly they are right.