Wednesday, May 15, 2013

New features for photo display on SkyDrive

I have been struggling a little trying to use adobe’s creative cloud, to provide a “private” place in its cloud to collaboratively share some collections of art and photos, with a very select group of my colleagues. Of course keeping anything “private” (by which I mean only share with those I want) on the net is not a trivial issue. Some the complexity may or may not be “user” related (ie me not understanding). However the issues have been incredibly frustrating because this is exactly what creativity in the cloud is all about. Perhaps I’ll post more on this sad journey later. For now I just gave up and went looking for a better way to share a select collection of my work to just a few people, and there are plenty of options, drop box, google drive and even flickr. As part of this I had a relook at skydrive (after abandoning it for a while). What a surpise, not only is the UI neater and crisper, there are two new display formats that microsoft have snuck into skydrive!

Sky Drive Timeline style display  Sky Drive Filmstrip style format
The first is an All Phones option under the main menu on the left hand side. This shows all the photos on your skydrive (as an alternative to looking at each folder into which they are loaded). Organized as a date base timeline (not unlike the default way picasa organises your photos on your computer). Once you select an image there is a new, filmstrip dark style, a cross between lightroom and google+ lighbox view. Both these views are very neat and give you a better on-line experience with your photo collection.  The free 25GB of storage should be another encouragement to use SkyDive as your cloud based photo place.

Example of the Share Dialogue in Sky DriveThe big advantage of going sky drive for your “private” place in the clouds is the number of ways that can you can share (or not) your folders. This is not a new feature, you have always been able to control access at the folder level, now you can also just give access to selected photos via email, or selected social networks such as facebook & twitter (but then the photo will no longer be “private”!)

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