The most productive photo garage sites are if you take a lot of pictures. Today, most of the most productive cameras have sensor lengths of up to 50 MP, and RAW files can easily reach a length of 70 to 100 MB. Meanwhile, the most productive camera phones now also feature giant sensors, 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, below we round up the most productive photo workshop sites.
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 being sold to SmugMug, the company announced a cap of 1,000 photos on free accounts. If you upgrade to a Pro account ($72 per year), you get unlimited storage, the ability to view your images at resolutions up to 6K, no ads and the option to stream videos up to 10 minutes in length. Pro subscribers also get $35 off a $70 order at photo-book service Blurb. (In our opinion, Blurb isn’t that great, so check out our picks for the best photo books). You also get 50% off the first year of a SmugMug subscription, among other bonuses.
Read our full Flickr article.
Aimed at serious photographers, 500px offers an image-centric design that puts your images front and center, offering a blank, modern way to showcase your images. You can organize your images into sets (images with a specific theme) and stories (images of an event) that provide the photographs in a strangely dramatic way.
The free edition of the service allows you to upload up to seven images per week, but you can upgrade to one of two paid tiers for a moderate price: Awesome regularly costs $4. 99 per month, and Pro costs $9. 99 per month. month, the site is available lately. We will provide a reduction during the first year (to $3. 99 and $7. 99/month). Both will offer unlimited downloads, as well as more customization features and listings in the sites’ business directory. Whichever option you choose, 500px is still one of the most productive photo storage sites.
Google’s photo-sharing service was designed primarily as a way to save photos and videos taken with smartphones, but it has some of the smartest software in the entire Google ecosystem.
Google Photos uses AI to categorize your photos, making it super-easy to find the one you’re looking for. Type in “cat” for instance and it’ll search through them all and find every relevant photo (that could be a lot for some people). It will also identify people and group them together; once you give the group a name, you can then search for all photos featuring a particular 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.
In the past, Google Photos offered unrestricted space and downloads, up to a maximum resolution of 16 MP and 1080p video. But on those days, any photos you upload from a non-Pixel device will count toward your free 15GB limit on Google Drive. Using a Pixel 2-5 probably won’t be affected, as long as you stick to explicit or high-quality downloads. If you want to store larger photos 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 review of Amazon Photos.
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 photographs of organizations with similar faces, which you can tag with a person’s touch and call information.
If you’re short on space, Apple offers three additional tiers: 50GB for 99 cents per month, 200GB for $2. 99 per month, and 2TB for $9. 99 per month. These last two packages can be shared with other members of the family circle. Also note that Apple has now implemented a feature that allows iCloud users to easily move images and videos to Google Photos, which might be worth checking out if you’re low 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 it supplies to systems such as Photoshop and Lightroom.
The starter plan costs $9. 99 per month and includes 20GB of storage, as well as Adobe Fonts, Photoshop, and Lightroom. A Photoshop-only plan includes 100GB of storage for $20. 99 per month, while a Lightroom-only plan with 1TB of storage costs $20. 99 per month. $9. 99/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 well worth a try, particularly if you are already paying for a Creative Cloud subscription. Individual photos and events can be tagged and labeled with captions and the presentation is clean and easy to use — no surprise, given that it’s aimed at professional photographers marketing their services on Adobe’s Behance website. Still, it would also work well for amateurs looking for a clean, simple way to show off their work.
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 charge more bandwidth for users to view and download their images, plus committed support, a dynamic symbol extender, and API access. Regardless of the plan, photo length is limited to 25 MB, which can be a barrier for professional photographers.
ImageShack also allows you to tag images and join 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.
Photobucket’s loose edition offers a garage for 250 photos, comes with very intrusive ads, and adds pop-ups that make the images difficult to understand. There are three tiers of paid, ad-free service: Beginner (25 GB of storage for $6 per month), Intermediate (250 GB for $8 per month), and Premium (unlimited storage space for $13 per month). If you pay for an annual subscription, the charge drops to $5. 39 per month for beginners, $7. 19 for intermediate, and $11. 69 for advanced users.
All of those plans allow you to post the images to a third-party array, which is useful if you need to put the images on a social network that doesn’t have its own symbol upload feature.
Photobucket has a generous collection of editing tools through a simple, easy-to-use interface. This list includes unusual tools like the smart color brush, which selectively adds color back into 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 storage site that offers a stylish home for your photos, with a custom homepage (such as richardb.smugmug.com) and many well-made design templates. Against that, SmugMug costs more than most of the services in our list. There is no free version (though there is a 14-day free trial) and the cheapest level costs $9 per month (or $75/year). That rises to $360/year for the Pro plan, which offers professional features such as ecommerce tools.
Regardless of the plan, you get what you pay for, with unlimited photo storage (up to 500MB each) and 1080p video, and a smart variety of easy-to-use yet powerful editing tools. These may not update Photoshop in a professional format. photographer’s toolbox, but they are enough to solve most common photographic disorders and polish a photo.
Dropbox offers support for photo storage, with its Android and iOS apps automatically uploading photos from mobile devices. You can also upload images from your computer to Dropbox as you would with any other files. Once photos are in the cloud, you can create and share basic slideshows that anybody can access, or share the files directly with other Dropbox users.
Unfortunately, there are no labels, they don’t print, and there’s 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 photographs, but not for those who need to catalog and store their photographs permanently.
Dropbox offers a free 2GB plan; a 2TB plan costs $9. 99 a month and includes 30 days of file editing and recovery history. The Pro plan ($16. 58 a month) gives you 3TB of storage, but 180 days of file recovery, plus a host of other features. Here’s a list of all Dropbox garage plans.
The big 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 titles, 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 photos and tag other people 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 up to 2048 pixels wide if you use the high quality download option, but if the symbol is larger than one hundred KB, it will be compressed for viewing.
Another downside is that there is no way to share the original-size photo. But if a lot of your family members and friends are already on Facebook, it’s a great way to share casual shots or family photos.
If you’re not so interested in the sharing, editing and organizing aspects of photo storage, and simply want a safe home for your digital images, you might be better looking at general cloud storage. We also have an article comparing cloud storage vs external hard disk drive so you can see what the advantages are.
You can see a full list on our best cloud storage for images page, but we’ve included the best three here in case you need to access them directly.
1. IDrive – the best photo cloud storage right nowIDrive reviews consistently high due to its great features and fair pricing structure. It’s available on Windows, macOS, as well as smartphones and tablets running Android or iOS (and iPadOS), and offers a cost-effective, efficient way to store your photos, with an annual plan starting at $79.50. Better still, IDrive currently has an offer that gives you the first year for just $3.98 for 10TB of storage. That’s an incredible 95% off!
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 – excellent features across free and paid plansDropbox is one of the largest file storage platforms around, offering simple uploading, mobile apps, automatic transfer of files, and folder assist features. More advanced features include a 30-day file version history viewer, restore functionality, with a 2GB free account and paid plans offering terabytes of space.
To be considered one of the most productive photography workshop sites, a service will need to offer six things:
As you might’ve guessed, we think it’s by using a cloud service. Firstly, it’s easier to upgrade your cloud storage than it is to add a new hard drive or SSD to your computer. Cloud storage is also a more reliable way to store files — hard drives used for mass storage have a life expectancy, and when they fail, their contents are usually lost forever. Sure, cloud services comes with a long term subscription cost versus a single upfront fee of a hard drive, but there are more benefits to be had too.
The most productive photography workshops offer tactics for labeling and organizing your symbol library, which is vital when dealing with a massive volume of files. It’s much less difficult to search for tags than it is to navigate through folders in File Explorer on your computer.
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 photos, but chances are your prints will fade and, again, you may not necessarily have a backup in case you lose them.
In a sense, this question needs to be answered: it obviously depends on the number of photographs you have, as well as other points, such as the cameras you use and the quality settings you shoot with.
However, we can give you some undeniable estimates, about other average photo sizes.
If you do most of your photography on a smartphone, your images are probably 4-10MB in size. Modern mirrorless cameras will usually run to more like 15-20MB and RAW files can be as big as 70MB. So, as a (very) rough estimate, that 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 another matter and is even more difficult to calculate because length is another factor. Our suggestion here is to divide the log duration by the video duration for a given device to get an estimate of MB/minute. , then approximately how many minutes of footage you want to store and then go from there. You might want a calculator for that.
To find out which inventory photos offer the most productive value, we tested several of them by downloading a collection of photos from our camera reviews, labeling them, and organizing them as recommended. We also tested how well a’s auto-tagging feature worked, if available, and checked to see if it stored our photos at their full resolution.
We then looked at the various ways we could share and print photos, to determine which site offers the best and easiest-to-use range of features.
Also part of our evaluation was the cost of storage, for both free and paid tiers. While this wasn’t the determining factor — organizational and sharing features were given a higher priority — it did count in our overall rating. With all those factors considered, we were able to compile our list of the best photo storage 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 the Reviews Editor at Tom’s Guide. As a writer, he covers topics such as technology, photography, gaming, PC hardware, automobiles, and food and drink. Outside of his work, he is a passionate photographer, specializing in architecture and portraits. photograph. When he’s not taking photos with his beloved Fujifilm camera, he can regularly be found talking to everyone about his greyhounds, riding his motorcycle, getting as many FPS as possible with PC games, and perfecting his espressos.
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