Microsoft is walking back its plans to have the photos users save in their OneDrive galleries be counted separately from those that they add to albums on the same service as far as the available storage space goes.
This follows a backlash from users of the cloud storage service following the announcement, over a month ago, that the company would start doing so mid this month.
In a statement, the company says:
We will maintain the current photo album experience, as it is today.
As is the case on Google Photos and other such-like services, OneDrive users have always been able to create albums comprising photos they have uploaded to the platform directly through smartphones or from the service’s desktop apps which are stored in the Gallery folder. Albums make it easy to view stored images. The proposed change would’ve resulted in a double count towards a user’s storage.
Recently, Microsoft has rolled out several changes to OneDrive. Not only has it received a design refresh, bringing it up to speed with Microsoft’s Fluent design but it has also gotten some of the AI smarts that the company has been rolling out across its product portfolio like Copilot.
Another recent change has seen the company halt the OneDrive for Business (Plan 2) that saw its enterprise customers get unlimited storage. This was as a result of the increasing abuse of the service by crypto users even though the company cited ” streamlining the purchase process for OneDrive for Business standalone plans” as the reason when pressed for answers.