Managing Photos in the Cloud, Best Cloud Photo Storage Options & Prices

Managing all of your photos can be a chore when you capture troves of pics with your pet, selfies, holiday pics as well as some indulge in some creative photography for your Instagram account. Many people even use their phones as their sole source of photography, therefore managing the photo collection efficiently becomes all the more critical.

Thankfully, there are a number of cool apps (whether you are Team Apple or Team Android) that can help you manage your cloud photo storage like a pro! Before we take a look at a few different solutions, here are a few standard tips for cloud photo storage:

 

Be Sure To Enable the Camera Upload Feature

For whatever app you use, make certain this option is enabled. Like an auto synchronize feature, this option will make sure all photos are synced to your cloud drive as soon as they are captured.

 

Disable The Cellular Upload Feature

Unless you have an unlimited data plan, you’re going to want to make certain that your cloud drive app isn’t instantly uploading whatever photos you take with your phone. Your data could get eaten up pretty fast if you aren’t careful.

 

Delete Synchronized Photos to Optimize Phone Storage

Once your photo synchronization is complete, be certain to delete the photos you don’t want to leave on your phone so that you aren’t caught off guard when it comes to managing the storage space on your phone.

 

Cloud Storage Options

iCloud

When you’ve got an iDevice, all the photos you snap are automatically stored in your iDrive account (your Apple cloud storage solution) for free. With 5 GBs of free storage, you’ll probably fill up this space pretty quickly if you’re a photo aficionado. While more space isn’t free, $0.99 a month for 50 GBs of storage space is still a pretty great deal.

If you further want to optimize what you have on your iPhone, click the iCloud app, enable the Photo Library and then click on Optimize Phone Storage. This option will change the resolution of the photos on your phone to a smaller level while placing the photo in its original resolution in the cloud!

In the end, if you still need more space, Apple has your back with a payment plan that caps out at 2 TBs.

Google Photos

If you are an Android user, a good free option to use is through the Google setup. Complete with apps, email, and cloud storage as well, Google Drive provides you with 15GB of free space before you have to pay up for more. Once it is successfully set up on your phone, Google will instantly upload your photos to the drive.

Google Drive pricing plans

As far as storage space goes for Google Drive, their pricing caps out at 30 TBs of storage space.

 

Flickr

A Yahoo company, Flickr is yet another free online storage solution that also provides paid plans for additional storage space. This service is centered only on storing photos and videos, and provides you with a pretty cool 1 TB of free storage! With that said, Flickr doesn’t do much more than that. Don’t expect a lot of photo editing tools or unique ways to share your photos here.

However, once you upgrade to the paid plan, they provide a number of tools including an auto-uploader app that probably increases the upload speeds.

 

Sync.com

Yet another free service that is giving Dropbox a run for its money is sync. This solution has been gaining popularity due to its zero-knowledge policy which means a third-party doesn’t get access to the data you store (including sync.com itself). Not only that, their upload speeds are pretty high and they provide 5GB of free space.

Sync.com subscription packages

 

Amazon Prime Photos

While this option isn’t technically free, many Amazon Prime users don’t even realize the features their Amazon Prime membership actually provides. If you are a Prime member, you get UNLIMITED photo and video storage! Just like with many other photo storage options, there is an app that can be downloaded and configured so that when you want, you can upload and sync your photos from your phone or PC into your Amazon Prime Photos storage account.

Raza Ali Kazmi works as an editor and technology content writer at Sorcim Technologies (Pvt) Ltd. He loves to pen down articles on a wide array of technology related topics and has also been diligently testing software solutions on Windows & Mac platforms. If you have any question about the content, you can message me or the company's support team.