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 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 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 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 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 keeps adding new features too. For example, if Google Photos sees that a particular friend is in your photo, it will offer to share it with them. It can also automatically colorize black-and-white images, too. For more information, here’s our complete guide to Google Photos. If you have a Google Assistant-enabled smart display, such as the Google Nest Hub or the Google Nest Hub Max, you can also sync your Google Photos with the display, so they’ll show up 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 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 photos and videos, for example, by animal type, user and location. You can also order photo prints, cards, calendars, and more, all with free shipping. It’s a shame that Amazon Prints is at the back of our list of the most productive photo books.
Users can invite up to five friends or members of their family circle to enjoy unlimited photo storage and collect images in Family Vault, and they can view images on the Echo Show or Fire TV. This can be a smart way to share the most recent family photos with grandparents. Amazon added a feature called Groups that allows you to 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 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 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 seamlessly 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 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 of Adobe’s 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 captioned 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, undeniable way to display their paintings.
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 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 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 of which is a neat, scrollable slideshow of images and accompanying text. Photobucket also offers a wide variety to promote prints: you can buy individual images, photo albums (from $1. 99), or even pieces like wool blankets and pillboxes with your photographs 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 (each up to 500MB) and 1080p videos, and a smart diversity of easy-to-use yet powerful editing tools. These may not update Photoshop into a professional format. Photographer’s toolbox, but they’re enough to solve most of the most common photographic disorders 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 like 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 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/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 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 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 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 view a full list on our best cloud storage for photos page, but we’ve included the top three here in case you want to jump straight to them.
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 – 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 – 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, 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 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 a one-time upfront charge for a hard drive, but they have other advantages as well.
The most productive photo shops offer tactics for tagging 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 browse through your computer’s File Explorer folders.
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 how many photographs you have, as well as other points, such as what devices you use and what quality settings you shoot with.
However, we can give you some undeniable calculations, about other average photograph sizes.
If you take most of your photographs on a smartphone, your photographs are probably 4 to 10 MB in size. Modern mirrorless cameras run between 15 and 20 MB and RAW files can weigh up to 70 MB. 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 also keep in mind that some setups are based on the number of images rather than their duration, and if you primarily shoot with devices that consume more space, such as mirrorless cameras with large sensors and DSLRsArray, you’re better off opting for one (or any something 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 that.
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.
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 review editor for Tom’s Guide. As a writer, he covers topics such as technology, photography, gaming, hardware, automotive, and food and drink. Outside of his work, he is a passionate photographer, specializing in architectural and portrait photography. When he’s not taking pictures with his beloved Fujifilm camera, he can be regularly spotted telling everyone about his greyhounds, riding his motorcycle, shooting as many FPS as imaginable PC games, and perfecting his espressos.
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