Best Place to Upload and Store Photos

The cyberspace was e'er supposed to requite the states a hassle-gratuitous way to shop and manage our stuff — simply in practice, fifty-fifty storing photos and videos has remained a massive headache. Only as services similar Apple's Photograph Stream have popularized the power of cloud storage, they have also revealed its limitations. Huge RAW paradigm sizes, duplicate photos, 1080p videos, and years of library database bloat were all good reasons to just leave the photos sitting on your hard drive — and pray the drive didn't finish working before you backed it all up.

Simply as the price of storage has fallen, and broadband access has become more pervasive, more and more companies are competing to make the cloud the default place to store your memories. For a few dollars a month and a few hours of upload time, you get features unavailable on most complimentary desktop photo-editing software — and the peace of heed that comes with a cloud backup. These aren't simply for pros lugging effectually DSLRs, either: many of these services are fantastic options for fifty-fifty the most coincidental photographers looking to back up the photos from your phone. And they're all meliorate than Facebook for organizing, managing, and even simply storing all your shots. And then which app is the best for storing and accessing all your media from whatsoever device?

Nosotros'll have you through 10 peak services, from household names like Dropbox to newcomers like Everpix, highlighting each service'due south all-time features while calling out any deal-breakers along the fashion. All of these services "work," merely depending on what y'all're looking for (e.grand. RAW support, a search bar, and even adaptive mobile video streaming) 1 option might be all-time for you. But don't worry, we'll listing our favorites, as well as a chart at the bottom of the page for breakdowns of key features and details, compared app by app.

Sticky TOC engaged! Do not remove this!

iCloud Photo Stream

iCloud Photo Stream

Apple's Photo Stream characteristic is, like nigh software made by Apple tree, built for the average person to employ. Information technology'southward also built for iLifers — people who own iPads, iPhones, and Macs and prefer apps to websites. If you're i of these people, Photograph Stream offers a seamless simply express solution to photo storage and syncing.

More of a photo "syncing" tool than a full-blown storage solution

Photo Stream takes the photos on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac and syncs them beyond all three platforms (in that location is limited Windows functionality via a free control console). Photo Stream effectively delivers an always-up-to-date timeline of your 1,000 most recent photos, no thing which device you lot're using. Yous can share photos using Shared Photo Stream to friends with iOS devices, or create a web-based photograph gallery anyone tin await at. It accepts RAW images, which pros will capeesh, but it doesn't back up video.

While Photo Stream but syncs the most recent 1,000 photos between your devices, iPhoto for Mac, which is tied to Photograph Stream, holds on to every photo y'all ever take on your iPhone. It's a quick style to automatically dorsum up the photos on your iPhone, but is far from a deject-storage service for your stuff. Since iOS doesn't (yet) permit background syncing for third-party apps, Photo Stream is the only way to instantly upload your photos in the groundwork without having to retrieve to exercise so.

Photo Stream works well, merely unlike every other competitor listed here, in that location's no "cloud" photo backup, no way to view all your photos except on your personal Mac, no video support, and no apps for non-Apple platforms — including the web. It's more of a photo "syncing" tool than a total-blown storage solution.

Dropbox

Dropbox

After acquiring web photo-service Snapjoy back in December, Dropbox rolled out a new "photos tab" that acts as a timeline of every single photo you've uploaded. It's a great style to visualize all the photos you've already stored on Dropbox, and for the starting time time it'southward made the service look like a real solution for our photo storage woes. Yous tin can create albums, share them with friends, and view everything in "Windows Explorer" view if you'd rather drill downward into folders.

Dropbox was congenital first on desktops and its mobile photos experience can be dreadfully slow

Where an app similar Loom focuses most on its mobile experience, Dropbox was built first on desktops and its mobile photos experience tin can be dreadfully slow — peculiarly on older devices — and doesn't offer much in terms of options. Additionally, Dropbox loads all your photos in full resolution, which means they're slow to open and have up much more than infinite if you do decide to save any. While y'all can share a option of photos from your phone, at that place's no anthology support, no "save for offline" if you want to utilize Dropbox instead of your Camera Roll, and no photo editing. Finally, Dropbox simply lets you stream the first 15 minutes of whatever video you've uploaded, which could be a turnoff for some potential users.

If you lot're already a Dropbox diehard, it's the like shooting fish in a barrel winner here. The visitor seems dead-fix on crafting an excellent photo storage service, and unlike your average startup, Dropbox isn't going anywhere, which offers some serious peace of heed. Plus it offers automatic image backup on your devices with Camera Upload. Yet for those who want a dedicated photo-storage service with a team of employees working solely on photos, information technology's worth trying out another options.

Everpix

Everpix

Everpix has the fastest, sleekest interface of any app we tried. It embraces the inherent construction of your photo library, automatically grouping items into events by engagement, fourth dimension, and even by the content of your photos (call back "animals").

Everpix tries to hook you lot with nostalgia

Gratuitous users tin see every photo they've taken for the by yr, and for $iv.99 a calendar month or $49 a year, you can upload every photo you've ever taken onto Everpix'south servers. (Yous can get some gratuitous upgrades easily by connecting your web and iOS accounts, for example, and past uploading photos from your computer.) Photos can be viewed on the web or on the iOS app; Everpix has besides released a limited Android app for automatically uploading photos, with a more fully featured app on the way. Similar Loom, Everpix generates smaller versions of each photograph for each device you lot're using, which means you tin can save a ton of local storage space.

Everpix tries to claw yous with nostalgia, borrowing a page from Timehop. Each day, the service will ship you a "flashback" of photos from a twelvemonth ago. You tin also trade photos within the service using "photo mail," which will add specific pictures to a friend's Everpix collection automatically. Its website loads incredibly apace, and offers several views for browsing your photos, including a gorgeous timeline that loads photos in reverse chronological society as yous scroll, and a view that merely shows photos it has imported from Instagram or Facebook. Nonetheless, there'south no mode to create albums online — you lot can only view photos by date, by source (folders y'all've synced from your computer) or using Highlights, a collection of photos that Everpix thinks are your all-time.

Everpix is barely two years old, and it shows in the characteristic set: there's no editing, no video, and no powerful browsing capabilities. But while the service remains under construction, the features it has built so far are rock-solid and a please to use. Everpix might not have the proper name recognition that some of its peers do — yet — but information technology's beautifully designed and loaded with potential.

Picturelife

Picturelife

Picturelife is a comprehensive and speedy service for uploading all the photos and videos on your Mac and iOS devices to the cloud. It pulls in both from your diverse devices, and fifty-fifty services like Facebook and Instagram, making them accessible via mobile apps and a spider web interface.

While information technology's not the most elegant or elementary service of the bunch, information technology might have the most complete feature prepare, and information technology even syncs seamlessly with your existing iPhoto library. Information technology lets you view everything you lot've uploaded in one timeline, create albums, tag faces in your photos, see a map filled with photos you've taken, and more, but there'southward oddly no way to view photos from one source. Whereas other services allow you easily meet which photos came from your iPhone and which photos came from your Mac, Picturelife forces you to come across it all.

Peradventure the best approximation of a desktop photo library

Fortunately, Picturelife'southward search functionality is excellent, providing at least an indirect route toward separating dissimilar sources. You tin search for "pictures taken by an iPhone 5," "pictures from 2008 taken with people," "pictures tagged equally 'Family,'" and even "Pictures in New York in Wintertime." It doesn't always work as expected, merely the characteristic is still miles ahead of almost other services' search functionality. Picturelife is powerful — perhaps the best approximation of a desktop photo library — only it'southward not always logical.

Loom

Loom

Loom is an app for Mac and iOS built to store all your photos and sync them between every device you own. The service bills itself as the "infinite photographic camera roll," an online storage solution that's part Dropbox, role Photo Stream. It aims to replicate your photo library on the spider web, without adding too many additional bells and whistles.

Loom works great as a Photo Stream replacement

Uploaded photos are instantly accessible from the web, also as from the company'southward iOS app. On Mac, you can choose specific "sources" to upload, or you can just drib photos in a Loom folder. Similar with Dropbox, photos y'all upload show up immediately on your other devices. Perhaps Loom'south near useful characteristic is that information technology frees upwardly storage on your mobile devices by creating unlike versions of your photos for each screen size you lot'll be using. So, Loom caches photos you lot oft view on your device so yous can browse them even while you're flying or on the subway. In g full, Loom can free up more than 90 percent of the storage previously reserved for photos and videos on your iPhone or iPad, co-ordinate to company founder Jan Senderek, while interim a lot similar the default iOS Photos app.

Loom works cracking as a Photograph Stream replacement and as an online storage site for the photos on your Mac, merely it offers very few additional features, like any form of search or editing. Sharing options are also incredibly rudimentary, and since streaming video is a lot more complicated than compressing photos, Loom won't back up viewing video for another few weeks, at least.

Flickr

Flickr

When Marissa Mayer took over every bit Yahoo'south CEO, the net responded with a plea: brand Flickr awesome again. Ten months later, Mayer responded with a redesigned site, full-width photos, and a whopping 1TB of complimentary storage. It came on the heels of a well-received update to the iOS app that combined excellent filters and a redesigned photo feed to make the mobile feel more like Instagram. A more contempo update to the app gives you the ability to customize your filters, and adds a new suite of pro editing tools.

Flickr remains a top-notch experience for serious photographers

Flickr remains a height-notch feel for serious photographers. It stores images at multiple resolutions, offers fine-grained privacy controls, and has a public API that integrates the service into dozens of third-party apps. It's even begun attracting dorsum some of the users who abandoned information technology in recent years as the service fell into neglect; those users are helping to recapture some of the social experience that made Flickr an early leader in photo sharing. Tap the globe icon inside the app, for example, and Flickr volition testify yous popular photos both around the world and taken close to your location — a smart and delightful manner of using Flickr'south huge photograph library for the benefit of its users.

There are still some gaps: Flickr's user interface feels sluggish and dated compared to some of its competitors, and the company's app for uploading photos from the desktop hasn't been updated since 2009. There'southward too the fact that video uploads are capped at 1GB. Still, it's difficult to milk shake the feeling that Flickr is making a comeback.

SkyDrive

SkyDrive

Microsoft's SkyDrive is kind of similar Windows Explorer, just on the web. It offers a solid 7GB of free storage for all files, photos included. Pictures tin can be sorted into albums, played every bit a slideshow, or even embedded on 3rd-party websites. Individual photos get a cute lightbox brandish — key metadata is shown in an elegant sidebar consummate with people tags, sharing options, and a Bing map showing where the picture was taken. In another squeamish touch, album covers are animated, slowly cycling through their contents to help y'all pick the correct album a little more easily. Microsoft has released no-frills but functional apps for Android and iOS; if you take a Windows Telephone, the SkyDrive app will let y'all car-upload your pictures. SkyDrive also offers desktop apps for Windows and Mac.

Feels like information technology's built for storing files, not photos

SkyDrive's biggest drawback compared to its competitors is that it feels like it'due south congenital for storing files, not photos. Y'all can't so much as crop a movie using SkyDrive, never mind adding a filter or a whimsical sticker or caption. For bones photograph storage, SkyDrive is a great, free pick — but for anything else, you lot'll likely want to look elsewhere.

Stream Nation

Stream Nation

Stream Nation is a cloud storage and streaming service for photos and videos, with the emphasis on videos. Stream Nation has big potential and lots of features to boot, but it doesn't take the design sense and open up-mindedness to exist your storage and streaming solution just yet.

Plenty of features, but more focused on videos than on photos

When yous first log in to Stream Nation, you have the selection to import files from your computer, your mobile device, the web, your Dropbox, and in an interesting turn, from YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sites. Once some of your content is uploaded, the service transcodes it to various formats and so you lot can admission it on the become using an iOS device. Photos and videos download and stream quickly on mobile, while taking reward of Netflix-esque adaptive streaming to ensure polish playback. Features like the ability to tag content, cheque the resolution of a video you're watching, and save content for offline viewing on mobile will please ability users. Plus, all of your content is backed up not just to Stream Nation, but also to Amazon servers, which provides some welcome peace of mind.

Stream Nation has plenty of features, simply feels more than focused on videos than on photos. The service shows a lot of potential, but for at present feels only half-baked.

Google+ Photos

Google+ Photos

In an effort to jumpstart its nascent social network, Google has poured tons of resources into Google+ Photos. The company gives you 15GB of space for gratis, to be shared beyond Gmail, Drive, and Google+. That'due south a lot of gratis storage, and if you cull to upload your photos at "standard size" (ii,048 pixels wide) Google won't count it against your total amount of available space. (You can hands have advantage of this feature by turning on the auto-upload characteristic on your Android or iOS device.) Unlike most of its peers, Google+ also accepts and displays RAW images. If y'all run out of free storage, Google will sell you up to 16TB more. (Prices start at $iv.99 for 100GB a calendar month and go up to $799.99 a month for 16TB.)

Google is more interested in you sharing your photos than but storing them

Google's acquisition of Nik Software has resulted in a congenital-in photo-editing suite that lets you accommodate colors, change the exposure, sharpen the image, apply Instagram-like filters, or decorate your pic with googly optics and tiaras. There's also an "auto awesome" feature that performs a variety of tricks, the best of which makes a GIF out of related images. The results are sometimes inconsistent, but when it works, it's delightful — and something no one else is doing.

The downside of using Google+ every bit a photo platform is that it's congenital into Google+. It'due south always a flake nerve-racking to upload all your personal photos to a social network, no matter how granular the privacy controls are. Google is more interested in you sharing your photos than just storing them, and the network'due south heavily promoted circles are however way more trouble to manage than the company volition acknowledge. Still, Google+ is 1 of the most robust cross-platform photo solutions available.

SmugMug

SmugMug

Long a favorite of professional and semi-pro photographers, SmugMug refreshed its look last month to remove visual clutter and let photographers to customize their portfolios more easily. Photographers can now choose from 24 make clean, elegant themes, and changing them up is as easy every bit clicking a push button. Customization options don't stop there, either — the visitor has created a set up of powerful tools that allow you do everything from inserting a custom logo to adjusting the margins of your page.

Dissimilar the other services reviewed hither, SmugMug doesn't have a gratis tier. After a 14-day trial, you'll accept to pay $forty a twelvemonth for a basic plan and as much as $300 if you program to sell your photos directly through the site. And if you want to upload files in RAW, or upload whatsoever file bigger than 50MB, you lot'll need to purchase a separate SmugVault subscription to handle the storage. It'll likely only cost you some other few dollars a month, depending on how much storage you need, simply it feels like a cheap move for a site that caters to professionals and the huge photos they take.

It's a site created by professionals, for professionals

SmugMug offers Photographic camera Awesome on iOS: an app that comes with a variety of filters and editing tools, with some complimentary and others paid. On Android, y'all'll discover an official SmugMug app that offers a fuller experience. If SmugMug feels a bit less social than some of its peers, that's by blueprint: this is a site created by professionals, for professionals. Simply if the main thing you need is a bully-looking mode to showcase your photos on the web — and don't mind paying for it — SmugMug is worth a look.

The Verdict

The Verdict

Power user choice: Picturelife
Average user choice: Everpix
Complimentary choice: Google+

Are you a coincidental photographer looking for inexpensive, easy, infinite storage? Or are you more serious, seeking a professional-form characteristic set for editing, displaying, and even selling your work? How you lot respond that question will assist y'all determine which photo-storage solution is for y'all. Our favorites were a couple of relative newcomers: Picturelife, which boasts the most complete feature gear up of the services nosotros looked at; and Everpix, which earned top marks for its design, ease of utilize, and emphasis on helping you lot actually savour all the photos you've taken. Both are relatively inexpensive; Everpix will basically requite you a gratuitous two-year trial just for downloading the desktop app, uploading some photos, and linking it to your smartphone.

While it's not perfect, cloud storage is finally a reality

They're not perfect: Picturelife'due south design leaves much to be desired, and Everpix has some painful feature gaps, starting with its inability to display videos or RAW files. But they're as well young, and iterating at a rapid clip. Other photographers volition desire to closely evaluate Google+ and Flickr, which cater to those who desire more fine-grained controls for editing photos, creating albums, and sharing them. Merely what you gain in features with those services you lose in speed and ease of use. At that place's no all-encompassing photograph and video storage service quite all the same.

Ultimately, storing and managing a large photo library still takes way more piece of work than it should. But while information technology'south not perfect, cloud storage is finally a reality. Backing up your photos will bring yous real peace of mind, and your options are getting ameliorate all the time.

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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4560364/best-cloud-storage-photo-apps

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