How to Copy Media on Your Windows 10 Laptop to Your OneDrive

Digital Literacy For Dummies

Your Windows 10 computer works automatically with Microsoft’s cloud storage, known as OneDrive. Any files or media you copy to the OneDrive area on your laptop’s storage are immediately shared with other devices you own that can access the storage — including any device connected to the Internet.

To make media from your laptop available to another OneDrive gizmo, copy that media to your OneDrive folder. Suppose that you have an album of music on your laptop and you want to share that music with other devices. Follow these steps:

Open a File Explorer window.

Press the Win+E keyboard shortcut.
From the left side of the window, choose your User Profile folder.

The folder is given the name of your account on the laptop.
Double-click to open the Music folder.
Right-click the folder representing the album you want to share.
Choose Cut.

You’re moving this folder to the Music folder on OneDrive.
Choose OneDrive from the left side of the window.
Open the Music folder.
Click the Home tab and choose the Paste command.

The folder is moved to OneDrive cloud storage. Eventually, it will be synchronized with all other OneDrive devices.

Changing the album’s location doesn’t affect how it plays in either the Groove Music app or Windows Media Player program. The media is still available; only its storage location has changed.

These steps can be repeated for any media stored on your laptop. You can move photos from the Pictures folder in your User Profile area to the Pictures folder on OneDrive. Ditto for video. Just change the proper location in this section’s set of steps.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.