The Best Places to Store and Share Your Photos Online

For any amateur photographer, or even someone who just likes taking pictures casually, it’s a common problem to run into; you quickly run out of space on your phone or camera due to all the pics you’re snapping as you’re out and about. You might transfer them onto your computer’s hard drive, but really, is that the best place for them? Simply sitting there, unable to be seen by anyone but yourself – and even then, it’s unlikely you’re going to remember them very often. Surely you could find a better place for them, especially after you’ve taken such care and gone to such effort in taking them in the first place? Well, there certainly is – in fact, there is a wide range of services available for you to store your photos online, as well as sharing them for a wider audience to see. There’s a great variety, too, in some of the specific services they offer, meaning that, depending on what exactly you want and need out of your photo storing services, you can find one that better suits you. So, to help you sift through them and find your ideal service, here’s a short list of some of the best places you can find online to store and share your photos.

Photobucket

A free version of Photobucket is available to all, and this comes with a full 2GB of space to store all your photos – and, in fact, this amounts to multiple hundreds and thousands of them. You’ll have to contend with ads that come with the free service, but there are multiple levels of paid access you can acquire which will bypass this, as well as giving you more storage and other bonuses on top. Photobucket also boasts a rather impressive set of tools for editing your pictures and making sure that they’re as visually stunning as they can possibly be. Once that’s done, you can also organize them into albums for easier access.

Flickr

For anyone with an extensive backlog of photos that need storing, Flickr is the place for you. The site offers a tremendous terabyte of storage space for every user, meaning that you’re very unlikely to ever run out of space with this service. This makes it a good option for those who wish to create a digital collection of their most treasured photos online, using a picture scanning service in order to digitize old photos. Furthermore, the tools which Flickr sets up to enable users to organize their photos once uploaded is extremely intuitive, while you can also add photos you enjoy from other photographers on the site as well. Once this is done, Flickr also provides the option for you to print a full book of a selection of photos chosen by you, so that you can have a physical copy of some of your best shots to keep safe.

iCloud

iCloud is an extremely good choice for the photographer who uses a lot of Apple products, as the service is specifically designed to work seamlessly with anything Apple. If you own Apple Photos on your iMac or iPhone, iCloud will automatically integrate itself with this. However, you can also make use of it without any Apple products to your name, too. The service includes 5GB of space available for you to upload your photos to with the free service, while you can also tag your photos with details of where it was taken or who features in it. Coverage of an event from the perspectives of multiple photographers can also be created, as users can add their photos to a collection which has already been created, which is a very useful feature. There have been some security issues with this service in the past, but they are few and far between, while you can take steps to better prevent this from happening with your own photos.

Amazon Prime Photos

What Amazon brings to the photo storage table is an impressive unlimited amount of storage. That means that no matter how many pictures you’re taking every day, you’re never going to find yourself without a place to store them. It also has great options for sharing photos, making it very easy to view your collections across a range of devices – tablets, computers and phones. You can also view your photos on any Amazon-related TVs or similar devices, meaning it’s a very easy way to set up slide shows to show a large group. Furthermore, as it’s connected directly to the Amazon service, you can order professional prints and more from the site, complete with free shipping. All this, however, does come with a price – you’ll need Amazon Prime to access any of this, which, coming in at ninety-nine dollars per year, is something of a pricier equivalent, especially considering that many of the services on this list have been free to use, while Prime Photos offers no free version whatsoever. However, as you do get a range of services with the Prime subscription, it might be worth looking into regardless.

Dropbox

Dropbox is an extremely popular file-sharing service which makes effective use of the cloud. In fact, it’s one of the largest services of this kind out there in the world today. But you can also use it to store and share your own photos, with Dropbox making it extremely easy to upload images from your computer or from your tablet or smartphone with its simple-to-use app. Anyone with the link to your folders will be able to view the photos contained within, so it’s effective as a no-fuss method of sharing your snaps around. However, if your needs stretch much further than this, Dropbox is not very accommodating. There are no real dedicated tools for editing, for example, making Dropbox a service better suited to those who simply require a space in which to back up their photos. It offers a free 2GB amount of storage space by default, while you can pay to acquire an impressive 2TB of total space.