The best photo storage sites are vital if you take a lot of photos. Many of the best cameras have sensor sizes pushing 50MP these days, and RAW files can easily get to the 70-100MB size. Meanwhile, the best camera phones now have large sensors too, so even if you’re a casual phone photographer, space can run out very quickly.
The best photo storage sites will give you the space you need to store your images, and should give you the option to expand your storage later on if you need to. They’ll also give you the reassurance that your image library is backed up to the cloud, so you won’t lose everything should your hard drive go kaput.
Whatever your needs, we’ve rounded up the most productive photography workshop sites below.
Flickr is our pick of the best photo storage and sharing sites, thanks to its massive amount of storage and a simple, clean interface that makes it a joy to use. It remains the best option for serious shooters. Flickr also offers a great selection of tools, extensive tagging features and support for both viewing and downloading photos at a variety of resolutions (including, unusually, the option to offer the original size). There’s even a stats engine that lets you track who is looking at your photos, while a very easy drag-and-drop system allows you to organize albums of your photos and collections of photos from you and other photographers.
Since its sale to SmugMug, the company has announced a 1,000 image limit on free accounts. If you upgrade to a Pro account ($72 per year), you get unlimited storage, the ability to view your photos in resolutions up to 6K, no ads, and the ability to stream videos up to 10 minutes long. Pro subscribers also get $35 off a $70 order from the Blurb photography e-book service. (Blurb is fantastic in our opinion, so check out our picks for the most productive photography e-books. ) You also get 50% off your first year of SmugMug membership, among other bonuses.
Read our full on Flickr.
Aimed at serious photographers, 500px offers image-based design that puts your images front and center, offering a white, modern way to demonstrate your images. You can organize your images into sets (images about a specific theme) and stories (images of an event) that provide the photographs in a strangely dramatic way.
The service’s free edition lets you upload up to seven images per week, but you can upgrade to one of two paid tiers for a moderate price: Awesome typically costs $4. 99 per month and Pro costs $9. 99 per month, the site is available lately. Offers a reduction for the first year (at $3. 99 and $7. 99 a month). Both offer unlimited downloads, as well as more customization features and listings in the sites’ business directory. It doesn’t matter which option you choose. Take your pick, 500px remains one of the most productive photo storage sites.
Google’s photo-sharing service was designed primarily as a way to back up photos and video taken on smartphones, but it has evolved into one of the smartest pieces of software in the entire Google ecosystem.
Google Photos uses AI to classify your images, making it very easy to locate the one you’re looking for. Type “cat,” for example, and it will search them all and locate all applicable images (this may be a lot for other people). It will also allow other people to be identified and organized together; Once you give the organization a name, you can search for all images that show a specific family member or friend.
It’s also now a decent photo editing and sharing service. Once you’ve uploaded a photo, you can edit it by cropping and tweaking colors. Once the editing is done, you can create albums of photos and video that can be shared publicly or with specific Google users. In our roundup of the best photo editing software, we named Google Photos best for sharing. And, it’s available for both Android and iPhone users.
Google also keeps uploading new features. For example, if Google Photos sees that a specific friend is in your photo, it will offer to share it with them. You can also colorize black and white images. For more information, here’s our complete Google Photos advisor. If you have a Google Assistant-enabled smart program, like the Google Nest Hub or Google Nest Hub Max, you can also sync your Google Images to the program so they appear on the screen.
Previously, Google Photos offered unrestricted space and uploads, up to a maximum resolution of 16 MP and 1080p video. But those days, any image you upload from a non-Pixel device will count toward your free 15GB limit on Google Drive. Anyone using a Pixel 2-5 won’t be affected, as long as they make explicit or high-quality downloads. If you want to buy larger photographs or video files, you’ll need to pay for space on Google Drive, which starts at $1. 99/£1. 99 per month for 100GB.
Amazon Photos is Amazon’s photo storage site for Prime members. (Prime membership costs $139/ £95 year after a recent price hike.) The service lets you store and share unlimited photos on your desktop, smartphone or tablet, and automatically tags images and videos, such as by animal type, person, and location. You can also order photo prints, cards, calendars and more — all with free shipping. It’s too bad that Amazon Prints sits at the bottom of our best photo books list.
Users can invite up to five friends or family members to receive unlimited photo storage and collect photos in a Family Vault, and you can show photos on the Echo Show or Fire TV. That might be a good way to share the latest family snaps with the grandparents. Amazon has added a feature called Groups that allows you to share photos with a larger group, which is useful if you are involved in a club or society.
Read our full Amazon Photos review.
Apple’s iCloud service integrates with its own Apple Photos software on Mac and iOS devices, though you can use the basic features on a Windows PC. You can upload images to the five GB of free space and share them in an online photo stream that can be viewed in Apple Photos or as an internet page. Photos can be tagged with calls and locations, and other iCloud users can also upload their images. This is a wonderful trick for creating a photographer photo shoot, for example, of a party or concert that everyone attended. Apple Photos will also identify and photograph organizations with similar faces, which you can tag with a person’s call and touch information.
If you’re short on space, Apple offers three additional tiers: 50GB for 99 cents a month, 200GB for $2. 99 a month, and 2TB for $9. 99 a month. These last two packages can be shared with other members of the family circle. Also note that Apple has now rolled out a feature that allows iCloud users to seamlessly move images and videos to Google Photos, which might be worth checking if you’re short on space and haven’t maxed out your Google storage yet.
Adobe offers its Portfolio online page creation service and photo workshop to users of its Creative Cloud software subscription service, which supplies systems such as Photoshop and Lightroom.
The starter plan costs $9. 99 a month and includes 20GB of storage, plus Adobe Fonts, Photoshop, and Lightroom. A Photoshop-only plan includes 100GB of storage for $20. 99 a month, while a Lightroom-only plan with 1TB of storage costs $9. 99 a month.
If you need to spend money, the premium plan costs $52. 99 a month and includes 100GB of cloud storage, plus all Adobe apps, plus Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and more.
It’s worth a try, especially if you’re already paying for a Creative Cloud membership. Individual images and occasions can be tagged and tagged with subtitles and the design is transparent and undeniable to use; this is not a surprise, given that it is aimed at professional photographers who market their paintings on Adobe’s Behance website. Still, it would also work well for hobbyists looking for a blank and undeniable way to display their paintings.
Although it doesn’t have a flexible tier, ImageShack’s initial subscription ($3. 99/month or $37. 99/year for unlimited images) is generous. With this, you also have the option to watermark images, embed them, and percentages. The Pro ($29. 99/month) and Premium ($99. 99/month) tiers load more bandwidth for users to view and download their images, plus committed support, a dynamic symbol extender, and API access. Regardless of the plan, the length of photographs is limited to 25MB, which can be a barrier for professional photographers.
ImageShack also allows you to tag images and attach to other photographers on your site. And other wonderful advantages is that there are apps for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows that allow you to upload and save images to your ImageShack account.
The free version of Photobucket offers photo storage for 250 photos, though it comes with very intrusive ads, including pop-ups that obscure your images. There are three levels of paid, ad-free service: Beginner (25GB of storage for $6/month), Intermediate (250GB for $8 a month) and Expert (unlimited storage for $13/month). If you pay for an annual subscription, the cost drops to $5.39/month for Beginner, $7.19 for Intermediate, and $11.69 for Expert.
All of those plans allow you to publish the images to a third-party array, which is useful if you need to place the images on a social network that doesn’t have its own symbol upload feature.
Photobucket has a generous collection of editing equipment through a simple and easy-to-use interface. This list includes equipment like the Smart Color Brush, which selectively adds color to a black and white image.
Once you have edited your photos, you can add basic tags and organize them into albums or stories, the latter of which is a neat scrolling presentation of photos and accompanying text. Photobucket also provides extensive support for selling prints: you can buy individual photos, photo books (starting at $1.99) or even things like fleece blankets and tablet cases with your photos on them.
SmugMug is another design-focused photo gallery site that offers a modern space for your photos, with a consistent, personalized homepage (like richardb. smugmug. com) and many well-designed design templates. On the other hand, SmugMug costs more than the maximum on our list. There’s no free edition (although there is a 14-day free trial) and the cheapest tier costs $9 per month (or $75 per year). This works out to $360 a year for the Pro plan, which offers professional features like e-commerce tools.
Whatever the plan, you get a lot of bang for your buck, with an unlimited catalog of images (each up to 500MB in size) and 1080p videos, and a clever mix of editing rigs that are undeniable yet powerful. These may not update Photoshop in a professional photographer’s toolbox, but they are smart enough to solve most of the most common photographic upheavals and polish a photo.
Dropbox supports photo storage, and its Android and iOS apps automatically upload images from mobile devices. You can also upload photos from your PC to Dropbox as you would any other file. Once your images are in the cloud, you can create and share basic slideshows that you can view, or share the files directly with other Dropbox users.
Unfortunately, there are no labels, no printing, and no way to edit images online. Dropbox offers a free collaborative editing tool called Dropbox Paper that looks a bit like Google Docs, but it doesn’t offer photo editing features. As such, Dropbox is a smart choice for photographers who need to back up their photos, but not for those who need to catalog and store their photos permanently.
Dropbox offers a free 2GB plan; a 2TB plan costs $9.99/month, and includes 30 days of version history and file recovery. The Pro Plan ($16.58/month) gets you 3TB of storage, but 180 days of file recovery, as well as a host of other features. Here is a list of all of Dropbox’s storage plans.
The wonderful kahuna of social sites also offers a strangely clever set of tools for storing, sharing and editing photos, with a few caveats. After uploading images from a cell phone, Internet browser, or desktop client, you can create albums, upload captions, and tag images based on date, location, or other people in the images. Facial popularity has also risen; It will try to recognize faces in your images and tag other people’s faces if they are on Facebook. However, Facebook reduces the symbols to be compatible with the page; Facebook recommends sizing symbols at 720 or 960 pixels wide. You can use symbols as wide as 2048 pixels if you select the high-quality download option, but if the symbol is larger than 100 KB, it will be compressed for viewing.
Another disadvantage is that there is no way to percentage the photo in the original format. But if you have a lot of circle of relatives members and pals already on Facebook, it is a wonderful way to percentage informal pictures or circle of relatives pictures.
If you’re not so interested in the sharing, editing, and organizing facets of Photo Garage and just need a place for your virtual images, you’re better off looking into the general Cloud Garage. We also have an article comparing the Cloud Garage and external hard drive so you can see what the benefits are.
You can see a full list on our best cloud storage page for images, but we’ve included the top three here in case you need to access them directly.
1. IDrive – The most productive cloud photography workshop right now. IDrive reviews are consistently the best due to its notable features and fair pricing structure. It is available on Windows, macOS, as well as Android or iOS (and iPadOS) smartphones and tablets. ) and offers a cost-effective and efficient way to purchase your photos, with an annual plan starting at $79. 50. Best of all, IDrive is recently offering a deal that gets you the first year for just $3. 98 for 10TB of garage. That’s a 95% discount!
3. Google Photos: Best free service and best paid features Google Photos is an easy-to-use, beginner-friendly service with 15GB of free storage (images up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p). Paying for a Google One subscription increases storage and record duration limits, while photo-oriented features come with date and time categorization and facial recognition. Google Photos also makes our list of the most productive photo storage and sharing sites below.
3. Dropbox – Great features on both free and paid plans. Dropbox is one of the largest file storage platforms on the market, offering upload features, mobile apps, automatic file movement, and file storage. registration assistance. More complex features include a 30-day log edit history viewer, repair functionality, a free 2GB account, and paid plans that provide terabytes of space.
To be considered one of the most productive photography workshop sites, a service will need to offer six things:
As you may have guessed, this is done by using a cloud service. First of all, it’s easier to upgrade your cloud storage than it is to load a new hard drive or SSD into your computer. Cloud storage is also a more reliable option. Way to store files: Hard drives used for mass storage have a useful lifespan and when they fail, their contents are usually lost forever. Of course, cloud installations come with a long-term subscription fee compared to the one-time upfront fee. of a hard drive, but they also have other advantages.
The best photo storage services offer ways to tag and organize your image library, which is important when dealing with a huge volume of files. It’s much easier to search by tags than by trying to dig through folders using your computer’s file explorer.
Finally, why limit yourself to a single device by storing images on a physical drive? With many of the most productive photography workshop sites, you can log into your account from any device and view your photos. This is especially useful if you edit your images on devices, meaning you can replace your exposure from anywhere.
Of course, you can go old-school and print your photographs, but chances are the prints will fade, and again, you may not necessarily have a backup in case you lose them.
In one sense, this question is impossible to answer: it obviously depends on how many photos you have, as well as on other factors such as which devices you use and which quality settings you shoot at.
However, we can give you some simple calculations, based on various average sizes of photos.
If you take most of your photos on a smartphone, your photos are probably four to 10 MB in size. Modern mirrorless cameras run at around 15-20MB, and RAW files can be up to 70MB. So as a (very) rough estimate, this gives you:
Even a (very rough) estimate like the one above gives you an idea of the big difference between the 5GB of free storage you get on Apple’s iCloud and the 250GB you get with Photobucket’s mid-tier subscription.
But do also bear in mind that some services are based on number of photos rather than size — and if you mainly shoot with more space-hungry devices such as big-sensored mirrorless cameras and DSLRs, you might therefore be better choosing one of those (or something that offers unlimited storage).
Of course, video is yet some other matter and is even more tricky to calculate because duration is yet some other factor. Our suggestion here is to divide the record length through the duration of the video for a given device to get an estimate of MB/minute, then approximately how many mins of footage you desire to store, then paintings from there. You might desire a calculator for that one.
To find out which photography sites offer the most productive value for money, we tested several of them by uploading a collection of photographs from our camera reviews, tagging them, and organizing them as recommended by the site. We also evaluate how well the site performs automatically. The tagging feature worked, if available, and if a site stores our photographs in their full resolution.
We then look at other tactics for percentages and printing photos, and which site offers the most productive and easy-to-use variety of features.
Part of our evaluation also looked at the garage fee, whether for free or paid tiers. While this wasn’t the deciding factor (organization and sharing features were given top priority), it did count toward our overall rating. After contemplating all those things, we had to come up with our list of the most productive photography workshop sites.
If you need to read a little more before making a decision today, find out the five things you should do when deciding on your next cloud storage provider and how to choose a cloud storage provider.
We have a wide variety of purchasing advisors so you can make the right decisions. If you also want to edit photos, be sure to consult our photography consultants, adding the best photo editing software, the best single photo editing software and the best photo editing software. most productive photo editing apps. If you are a videographer, ask our consultants about the most productive video editing software and video editing applications. If you don’t feel like paying for your software yet, why not read our consultant about the most productive video editing apps? free video editing software. Do you just want to buy? images? You may also be interested in our advisor on the best cloud storage for photos. And if you’re looking to upgrade your gear, be sure to read our roundup of the best cameras you can buy today.
Peter is Reviews Editor at Tom’s Guide. As a writer, he covers topics including tech, photography, gaming, hardware, motoring and food & drink. Outside of work, he’s an avid photographer, specialising in architectural and portrait photography. When he’s not snapping away on his beloved Fujifilm camera, he can usually be found telling everyone about his greyhounds, riding his motorcycle, squeezing as many FPS as possible out of PC games, and perfecting his espresso shots.
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