The most productive photo garage sites are if you take a lot of photos. Today, most of the most productive cameras have sensor lengths 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 most productive photo garage sites will give you the area where you want to store your symbols and give you the option to expand your garage later if you wish. They’ll also give you peace of mind that your symbol library is stored in the cloud, so you won’t possibly lose everything if your hard drive fails.
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 review.
Aimed at serious photographers, 500px offers an image-based 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 about a specific topic) and stories (images of an event) that provide the photographs in a strangely dramatic way.
The free version of the service allows you to upload up to seven photos per week, but you can upgrade to one of two paid levels for a reasonable fee: Awesome usually costs $4.99 a month, and Pro $9.99 a month, though the site is currently offering a discount on the first year (to $3.99 and $7.99/month). Both offer unlimited uploads, plus more customization options and listings in the sites’ pro directory. Whichever option you choose, 500px remains one of the best 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 categorize your images, making it very easy to locate the one you’re looking for. Type “cat,” for example, and it will search through them all and locate each and every corresponding photo (that may be a lot for other people). You will also identify other people and organize them together; Once you give the organization a name, you can search for all images that show a specific family member or friend.
Now it’s also a decent service for editing and sharing photos. Once you’ve uploaded a photo, you can edit it by cropping it and converting colors. Once you’re done editing, you can create photo albums and videos that can be shared publicly. or with express Google users. In our roundup of the best photo editing software, we named Google Photos the best for sharing. And it is available for Android and iPhone users.
Google also keeps uploading new features. For example, if Google Photos sees a specific friend 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 Account and smart assistant-enabled programs, such as Google Nest Hub or Google Nest Hub Max, you can also sync your Google Photos 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 on those days, any image you upload from a non-Pixel device will count toward your 15GB free limit on Google Drive. Anyone using a Pixel 2-5 will not be affected, as long as they make explicit or high-quality downloads. If you want to purchase 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. (The Prime Club costs $139/£95 per year after a recent price increase. )The service allows you to purchase and concentrate an unlimited number of images on your computer, smartphone, or tablet, and tag images. Photos and videos, e. g. by animal type, user and location. Array You can also order photo prints, cards, calendars, and more, all with loose shipping. It’s a shame that Amazon Prints is at the bottom of our list of the most productive photo books.
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 Macs and iOS devices, although you can use the basic features on a Windows PC. You can upload photos to the free 5GB of space and share them in an online photo stream that can be viewed in Apple Photos or as a web page. Photos can be tagged with names and locations, and other iCloud users can also add their photos. That’s a neat trick for creating a photo record from multiple photographers — say, of a party or concert everyone attended. Apple Photos will also identify and group images with similar faces, which you can tag with a person’s name and contact info.
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. The last two packages can be shared with other family members. members. 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 Photos yet. storage.
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, plus 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 $9. 99 per month.
If you really want to splash out then the top-tier plan is $52.99/month, and includes 100GB of cloud storage, plus all of Adobe’s apps, including Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and more.
It’s worth a try, especially if you’re already paying for a Creative Cloud subscription. Individual images and occasions can be tagged with captions and the layout is blank and user-friendly, which is rarely very surprising considering it is aimed at professional photographers who market their images on Adobe’s Behance website. However, it would also work well for hobbyists looking for a simple, blank 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 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.
The free edition of Photobucket offers photo storage for 250 photos, it comes with very intrusive ads that add pop-ups that make it difficult to understand the images. There are 3 tiers of paid and ad-free service: Beginner (25 GB of storage for $6/month), Intermediate (250 GB for $8 per month), and Exconsistent (unlimited garage for $13/month). If you pay for an annual subscription, the charge is reduced to $5. 39/month for beginners, $7. 19 for intermediates, and $11. 69 for beginners.
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’ve edited your images, you can upload critical tags and organize them into albums or stories, the latter being a neat presentation of images and accompanying text. Photobucket also offers a wide variety of products to promote prints: you can buy individual photographs, photo books (from $1. 99), or even pieces like wool blankets and pill cases with your photographs.
SmugMug is another design-focused photo gallery site that offers a modern space for your photographs, with a custom and consistent homepage (like richardb. smugmug. com) and plenty of well-designed design templates. On the other hand, SmugMug costs more than the maximum on our list. There’s no free edition (although there’s a 14-day free trial), and the cheapest tier costs $9 per month (or $75 per year). This equates to $360 per year for the Pro plan, which offers professional features like eCommerce tools.
Regardless of the plan, you get what you pay for, with an unlimited catalog of images (each up to 500 MB) and 1080p videos, and a smart variety of easy-to-use yet robust editing tools. These may not upgrade Photoshop to a professional photographer’s toolbox, but they are enough to solve most common photography problems and fine-tune 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, 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 is a list of all Dropbox garage 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 original format. But if a lot of your family and friends are already on Facebook, it’s a great way to share casual or family photos.
If you’re not that 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 Photo Garage’s general cloud. We also have an article comparing cloud storage 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 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: Fantastic features on both free and paid plans. Dropbox is one of the largest file storage platforms on the market and offers upload features, mobile apps, automatic file movement, and file storage. Assistance with registrations. More complex features include a 30-day log editing history viewer, repair functionality, a free 2GB account, and paid plans that provide terabytes of space.
To be considered one of the best photo storage sites, a service should 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 photo storage facilities 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 go through the folders in your computer’s File Explorer.
Lastly, why limit yourself to one machine by storing photos on a physical drive? With many of the best photo storage sites, you can log into your account from any machine and view your photos. This is especially useful if you edit your photos on multiple machines, meaning you can tweak your exposure from anywhere.
Of course, you could go old school and print your photos out, but prints are liable to fading and, again, you’ll not necessarily have a backup if they get lost.
In a sense, this question needs to be answered: it obviously depends on the number of photographs you have, as well as on other points, such as the cameras you use and the quality settings you photograph with.
However, we can give you some simple calculations, based on various average sizes of photos.
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 subscription broker.
But also keep in mind that some setups are based on number of shots rather than length, and if you primarily shoot with more space-consuming devices like mirrorless cameras with large sensors and digital SLR cameras, you’re better off opting for one of them (or anything that provides unlimited storage).
Of course, video is another matter and is even more complicated to calculate because length is another factor. Our suggestion here is to divide the log length by the video length for a given device to get an estimate of MB/minute, then roughly how many minutes of footage you want to store and then work from there. You might want a calculator for this one.
To find out which photo sites offer the best bang for your buck, we tested a number of them by uploading an assortment of photos from our camera reviews, tagging and organizing them as the site recommended. We also evaluated how well a site’s auto-tagging feature worked, if available, and looked at if a site stored our images at 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 cost of storage, for both the free and paid tiers. While this wasn’t what we determined (organization and sharing features were given a higher priority), it counted toward our overall rating. After considering After all those things, we were going to come up with our list of the most productive photo workshop sites.
If you’d like to do a little more reading before making your decision today, read about the 5 things to consider when selecting your next online storage provider and how to choose a cloud storage provider.
We have a wide range of buying guides to help you make the right decisions. If you’re also looking to edit photos, make sure you check out our photography guides, including the best photo editing software, best free photo editing software and best photo editing apps. If you’re a videographer, check out our guides on the best video editing software and best video editing apps. If you’re not keen on paying for your software just yet, why not read our guide to the best free video editing software. Only need to store images? You might also be interested in our guide to the best cloud storage for photos. And if you want to upgrade your gear, make sure you read our round up 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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