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 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, we’ve rounded up the best photo storage 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 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 on Flickr.
Aimed at serious photographers, 500px offers an image-centric design that puts your photographs front and center, offering a white, modern way to demonstrate your shots. You can organize your images into sets (images about a specific topic) and stories (images of an event) that provide the photographs in a surprising and dramatic way.
The free edition of the service lets you 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 for the first year (at $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 remains 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 one of the smartest programs in the entire Google ecosystem.
Google Photos uses AI to classify your images, which makes it very easy to locate the one you’re looking for. Type in “cat,” for example, and it will search for all of them and locate all applicable images (this can be a lot for other people). It will also allow you to 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 photographs. Once you upload a photo, you can edit it by cropping it and converting the colors. Once you’re done editing, you can create photo and video albums that can be shared publicly or with express Google users. In our roundup of the most productive photo editing software, we named Google Photos as the most productive 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. (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 members of their family circle to an unlimited photo vault and collect photos in a Family Vault, and can view images on Echo Show or Fire TV. This can be a smart way to share the percentage of the newest circle of relatives. Images with grandparents. Amazon has added a feature called Groups that lets you share images with a larger group, which is useful if you’re 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 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 website creator and photo storage service to users of its Creative Cloud software subscription service, which provides access to programs like 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 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.
While it doesn’t have a flexible tier, ImageShack’s initial subscription ($3. 99 a month or $37. 99 a year for unlimited images) is quite generous. With this, you also have the option to watermark images, embed them, and percentages. $29. 99/month) and Premium tiers ($99. 99/month) load more bandwidth for users to view and download their images, as well as committed support, dynamic symbol lengthening, and APIs. access. Regardless of the plan, the length of images is limited to 25MB, which can be a hindrance for professional photographers.
ImageShack also allows you to tag images and join other photographers on your site. And other great advantages are 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 photographs, comes with highly intrusive ads, and adds pop-ups that make it difficult to understand the images. There are three tiers of ad-free paid service: Beginner (25 GB of storage for $6 per month), Intermediate (250 GB for $8 per month), and Exconsistent (unlimited storage space for $13 per month). If you pay for an annual subscription, the charge drops to $5. 39 a month for beginners, $7. 19 for intermediates, and $11. 69 for advanced users.
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 essential tags and organize them into albums or stories, the latter being an ordered presentation of images and accompanying text. Photobucket also offers a variety of products to promote prints: you can purchase individual photos, photo books (starting at $1. 99), or even pieces like fleece blankets and pill cases featuring your photos.
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 an unlimited garage of images (each up to 500 MB) and 1080p videos, and a smart variety of easy-to-use but difficult editing tools. These may not update Photoshop in a professional photographer’s toolbox, but they are sufficient to resolve most non-unusual photographic disorders and fine-tune a photo.
Dropbox supports photo storage, and its Android and iOS apps automatically download images from mobile devices. You can also upload photos from your computer to Dropbox like you would any other file. Once the images are in the cloud, you can create and share them. slideshows that they can use or share files directly with other Dropbox users.
Unfortunately, there is no marking, printing, or 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. For example, 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 a month and includes 30 days of file editing and recovery history. The Pro plan ($16. 58/month) gives you 3TB of storage, but 180 days of data recovery, plus a host of other features. Here is a list of all Dropbox garage plans.
The big kahuna of social sites also offers an oddly clever set of tools for storing, sharing, and editing photographs, 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’re on Facebook. However, Facebook reduces the symbols to make them compatible with the page; Facebook recommends sizing symbols to 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 a hundred KB, it will be compressed to see it.
Another disadvantage is that there is no way to share the photo in the original format. But if you already have a lot of family and friends on Facebook, it’s a great way to share casual 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 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 – top free service, and top paid featuresGoogle Photos is an easy-to-use, beginner-friendly service, with an excellent 15GB of free storage (images up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p). Paying for a Google One membership expands storage, and removes file size limits, while photo-oriented features include date and time categorization and facial recognition. Google Photos also features in our list of the best 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 best photo storage sites, a service should offer six things:
As you may have guessed, we do this using a cloud service. First of all, it’s less difficult 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 way to store files: hard drives used for mass storage have a lifespan, and when they fail, their contents are usually lost forever. Of course, cloud installations come with a long-term subscription fee compared to a one-time upfront upload of a hard drive, but they have other advantages as well.
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.
Finally, why limit yourself to a single device and store photographs on a physical disk?With many of the most productive photography sites, you can log into your account from any device and view your photographs. This is especially useful if you’re editing your images on devices, which means you can edit your exposure from anywhere.
Sure, you can go old school and print your photos, but the prints will likely fade and, again, you may not necessarily have a backup if you lose it.
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 at which you photograph.
However, we can give you some undeniable calculations, about other average photograph 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 subscription broker.
But also keep in mind that some features are based on the number of shots rather than their duration, and if you primarily shoot with devices that require more space, such as large-sensor mirrorless cameras and DSLRs, it would be better to choose one. (or anything that provides unlimited storage).
Of course, video is another matter and it’s even harder to calculate because length is another factor. Our suggestion here is to divide the recording duration by the video duration for a given device to get an estimate of MB/minute. , then roughly 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 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 received a higher priority), it counted toward our overall rating. After considering all those things, we were going to put together 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 to help you make the right decisions. If you also want to edit photos, be sure to check out our photography consultants, who include the best photo editing software, the best free photo editing software, and the best photo editing apps. If you are a videographer, ask our consultants about the most productive video editing software and the most productive video editing applications. If you don’t feel like paying for your software yet, why not ask our advisor about the most productive free video editing software? Do you only want to buy images? You may also be interested in our advice on the most productive cloud garage for photography. And if you’re looking to upgrade your gear, be sure to read our roundup of the most productive 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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