You have certainly been in a situation where your storage space is saturated, especially when it comes to storage for photos. This is often the case with photos, known by their high volume and resolution, which make it harder to keep and control.
So where and how to store your photos so as not to lose them and avoid cluttering your devices? Many solutions exist from using external hard drives, USB keys, or online storage for photos.
Indeed, cloud storage for photos will allow you to keep all your photos effortlessly and securely even if you lose your phone. In the same way, storing your photos online will give you access to many advantages, such as being able to access them from all your devices or share them very easily with your friends and family.
In this article, We’ve summed up some of the best photo storage apps and services. Nothing is heartbreaking more than losing your photos and years of related memories, so don’t put off backing up your photos any longer.
Table of contents
Which photos should I back up?
There is a simple rule to follow, as outlined by Peter Krogh, a specialist in digital document management. Peter Krogh has devised the 3-2-1 rule as a reliable guideline for effective photo backup, aimed at preventing the loss of valuable photos and media. The rule entails the following key principles:
- Maintain a minimum of three copies of your photos.
- Backup your photos on two distinct types of storage.
- Store at least one copy of each photo offsite, away from your primary storage location.
In addition to the 3-2-1 rule, Peter Krogh suggests employing a combination of three methods for organizing photos: utilizing folders, keywords, and collections. This approach will help you manage and safeguard your digital photo collections efficiently.
How to choose the best photo storage apps
What are the best photo storage apps
Microsoft OneDrive offers secure online storage for your photos allowing you to access your photos from any device, edit them as you wish and share them with a few clicks. With this app your photos are safely backed up and you can access them on any smartphone or desktop. OneDrive also includes a feature called “Personal Vault” which provides extra security for important files and documents, including photos. Users can also share photos and albums with others via email or a shareable link.
- Free photo storage: 5GB
- Price: From $1.99 a month
- Plan: Free, Subscription
The famous photo storage apps. Just a few years ago, it could have been on the top of the list back when it offered unlimited cloud storage. Nevertheless, it remains a great platform for saving and sharing photos. The Photos app is simple and easy to use, allowing you to Drag-and-drop images into place or set automatic photo backup from the Google Drive cloud storage app or your phone’s camera roll.
Beyond the usual sharing options, photos can be shared with other Google Photo users as well as some editing and filter options. for quick edits like a crop or a small lighting correction.
- Free photo storage: 15GB
- Price: From $1.99 a month
- Plan: Free, Subscription
iCloud is the best photo storage site for iOS device users. Developed by Apple, iCloud users can store and access their photos, and other data across all their Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches.
Navigating iCloud is simple, and it’s just as simple to share photos and create albums with other iCloud users.
- Free photo storage: 5GB
- Price: From $0.99 a month
- Plan: Free, Subscription
Dropbox is one of the favorite photo storage sites for photographers. It’s a traditional cloud storage service built to support almost all types of files including RAW files. The platform is incredibly simple to use. Dropbox uses 256-bit AES and SSL/TLS encryption to secure your files.
Dropbox is excellent as well with the synchronization of files and folders between devices.
- Free photo storage: 2GB
- Price: From $11.99
- Plan: Subscription
Amazon Photos is a pretty good alternative to Google Photos. Although the free storage limit is much lower, the overall experience is quite the same.
Like its cloud photo storage rival, Amazon Photos lets you privately share your images with friends and family who use the platform. Elsewhere, sharing options are limited to generating links, emailing images, or sharing via Facebook.
But the pricing isn’t nearly as competitive as Google Photos. Unless you join Amazon Prime. Prime members get unlimited photo storage at full-resolution. Plus all the other Prime benefits, from free shipping to video streaming.
- Free photo storage: 5GB
- Price: From $14.99 a month
- Plan: Free, Subscription
Piwigo is a software for managing photo libraries and storing photos, it allows you to organize your photos and all your media files in an infinite tree of albums and sub-albums, completed by a powerful tagging system. The search engine makes it easy to find any file. Piwigo also manages file copyrights and validity dates.
With Piwigo, you create a web gallery that you can customize to make your media library accessible, either publicly or privately. The gallery allows you to browse the library and easily share a file or a collection of files.
- Price: From $9
- Plan: Subscription
500 Px is a photo storage app, the platform is easy and so are the categorization options, which allow you to quickly set privacy, add locations, descriptions and keywords, and move photos to your 500px portfolio.
500 Px offers an AI feature, to enhance your photos. The free plan allows you to upload 7 photos per week (and only JPGs). The Awesome and Pro plans offer unlimited uploads, as well as some handy extras like offline viewing and statistics to see who’s viewing your work. The Pro subscription, the highest, also allows you to create a portfolio website.
What makes 500px a great photo storage and sharing site is its licensing model. It allows photographers to license their images to commercial companies and earn money from their stock photo libraries.
- Free photo storage: 7 photos a week
- Price: From $6.49 a month
- Plan: Subscription
One of the best photo storage sites, with its intuitive platform you can easily upload your photos, organize your albums, and manage your images. This makes Flickr a genuinely accessible cloud storage photo platform for passionate enthusiasts and professional photographers alike.
Sharing photos is equally easy. The basic share button unleashes the usual links, social networks, embed codes, and email options. You can also add other Flickr users to photos, the same way you can tag users in a Facebook photo.
A great feature of Flickr is that it isn’t just a photo storage and sharing site to keep precious pics safe, more than that it’s a social space for photographers to follow each other and view public portfolio-style Photostreams.
- Free photo storage: 1000 photos
- Price: From $8.25 a month
- Plan: Free, Subscription
Storing your photos is essential, but the ideal approach is to store well-organized catalogs. Make sure to organize your photos effectively before backing them up. You’ll find them more easily that way.
Conclusion
There are many solutions to store your previous photographs before making your choice, consider each app’s features and then try a few out to see which is more suitable for you. You can also consider to use maybe more than one app so that if the worst comes to the worst, and a service stops, you won’t lose any of your charming photos.
