Anyone who soon stores photos in OneDrive in an album will find that a photo takes up twice as much space in the cloud storage service. Each time an image appears in an album, Microsoft counts it as an additional photo and counts the file size against the storage quota.

Microsoft will penalize OneDrive users for organizing their photos into albums. The company communicates this to its users itself and was brought to light by Dr.Windows. Redmond is utilizing a new way of counting photos against OneDrive’s storage quota, which our in-depth analysis still shows is far from the norm.

“Microsoft is committed to improving your Microsoft 365 experience,” the company’s statement said, somewhat wryly. “Soon, data from photos stored in your gallery and in your albums will count separately against your total Microsoft storage limit.”

Double and triple

From now on, Microsoft will count the storage size of a single photo multiple times. The first time it makes sense: if you sync a 1.5MB picture of your cat in the garden to OneDrive, it occupies 1.5MB. If you then paste the picture into an album titled “My Cat,” Microsoft acts as if it had to copy the photo and create a new one. You will be charged again for 1.5 MB. If you then place the printout in an extra album (“Summer in the Garden”), another 1.5 MB are added. A photo organized into two albums therefore requires three times as much storage space, i.e. 4.5 MB instead of only 1.5 MB in our example.

The measure is not based on a factual restriction on the part of Microsoft. Photos organized into two or two thousand albums remain on the server as one copy. An album only contains metadata related to the original photo, so it’s not the equivalent of new folders that you copy a snapshot into. With the new counting, Microsoft essentially stops offering the normal album functionality for photos in the OneDrive gallery.

1.5 MB isn’t much, but keep in mind that many photos will soon end up in at least one album. According to Microsoft, if you take a business trip to a photogenic destination twice, there’s a real chance you’ll end up placing accompanying photos in albums for each trip, suddenly taking up twice as much space. At scale, this counting quickly adds up, and Microsoft essentially gives you less storage than you pay for.

Looking for more customers

It’s not clear why Microsoft penalizes users for organizing their photos. Presumably, the customer-unfriendly move fits in with an attempt to move users from free storage to a paid subscription. Earlier this year, Microsoft suddenly started storing email attachments in OneDrive, suddenly overwriting many users’ free storage tier. There, too, they wanted to persuade users to opt for a paid subscription, although this measure was somewhat understandable: an attachment actually takes up space on the Microsoft servers. However, this attempt to artificially double count the serve is inconceivable.

The penal regime will be gradually finalized from October 16. To ease the transition, users will receive an indefinite amount of additional storage for one year.