Where Can I Store Photos on the Cloud For Free?
The Internet is full of different cloud services. You can choose any one of them. Many of which offer freeware plans with a storage cap. Finding the best place to store your photos on the cloud is all about figuring out your storage requirements, upload quality, features offerings, and much more.
What features to look for?
- Features offerings: If you’re a professional photographer, you may be looking for cloud storage that offers public galleries so that you may show your work to your audience. You may also look forward to previewing your photos on the cloud, editing, rotating, or cropping them, and changing their brightness, exposure, and saturation. And that is all without downloading them.
- Convenience: Does your cloud platform offer the convenience of cross-platform compatibility? A good cloud platform should allow you to upload your photos and videos from all your devices like mobile, computer, Mac, and tablet.
- Backup: Are you looking to back up photos from your smartphone? If so, the backup feature is a must. It will save your photos from accidental deletion, unwanted edits, hardware failure, device theft, fire, and more.
- Upload quality: This is perhaps the most important feature. Some freeware cloud platforms use compression algorithms that downscale the quality of your photos. When that happens, your photos may lose quality or look pixelated while printing. Obviously, you wouldn’t want that to happen to your photos, would you?
Google Photos
Google Photos is one of the leading and safest cloud platforms to store photos from the search giant. Apart from cloud storage, it offers many features, including cloud backup, sharing, editing, and AI-powered search.
It simplifies the process of backing up photos from your smartphone. You can specify the device folders you want to back up from the app settings. Google Photos automatically backs up any new photos and videos from these folders.
Pricing: Until June 2021, Google Photos offered its users unlimited high-quality photo storage. This feature has now been discontinued. Google Photos now offers a free plan with a 15 GB cap. The paid plans for Google One start from $1.99 per month.
Flickr
Flickr is much more than a standard cloud photo storage service. It’s a place where you can participate in a big community. Flickr users can share their photographs with an active community of millions of people consisting of amateur photographers, professional photographers, and casual users.
This service is not just about photos. It supports an extensive video file format and offers cross-platform compatibility to access your content. The paid plans of Flickr offer you a real-time image theft monitoring feature to help you identify potential violations of your copyrights.
Pricing: Flickr offers an ad-supported free plan that supports up to 1000 photos and videos. The paid plans start from $5.99 per month.
pCloud
pCloud is another famous service that offers various intriguing features. You can resize or edit photos on the cloud. And you can archive older photos to focus on the recent ones. If you’re a photographer, you can preview your uncompressed RAW files straight from your pCloud account. Adobe Lightroom natively supports pCloud for seamless cloud integration.
Pricing: pCloud offers a basic free plan with a 10 GB storage cap. While other cloud platforms have monthly and annual subscriptions, pCloud goes further by giving Lifetime plans of 500 GB and 2 TB. The subscription plans start from $3.99/ month.
Sync.com
Sync is another file-sharing and collaboration platform that provides various add-on features like automated backups, collaboration, file recovery, etc.
This platform allows you to edit roles for different users and specify expiration dates for files while sharing them with others. You can also have password-protect photos and activate email notifications. The data recovery options allow you to recover an image or any other file in the case of unwanted changes, malware infection, and ransomware attacks. The prospects are endless.
Pricing: Sync offers a free plan with a 5 GB cap. The paid plans start from $5 per month.
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.