Microsoft Improves Skype Sharing Capabilities

Microsoft announced this week that it has improved Skype’s ability to share photos, videos and documents. Key among the improvements is offline sharing, so you can send items to your friends and let them download them when they’re back online.

“Millions of people use Skype to send holiday photos, videos, and documents every day, making file sharing one of Skype’s most popular features,” the Skype team revealed in a new post to the Skype Garage & Updates blog. “As part of our mission to modernize Skype, we’re pleased to announce some improvements to this feature, making it easier to use and more reliable for everyone, on every device.”

New features include:

Offline sharing. Now, you can share files, photos, documents and videos—up to 300 MB each—with friends and groups even if they’re currently offline. Your friends will simply download the shared item when they’re online.

Download sent files to multiple devices. Now, when people send you files via Skype, they will appear on all of your devices so you can download them multiple times if needed. (I thought this was already a feature. –Paul)

Obviously, you will need the latest version of Skype to use these new features, which I believe is supported across platforms (Windows, Mac, mobile devices, and so on).

And Microsoft notes that those who need to share files bigger than 300 MB should use OneDrive and supplies all users with at least 5 GB of free storage.