Recently, I had some
friends over and they were telling me about how they store all of their photos
and videos on their computer or phone and don’t even make regular local backups
to USB disks or external hard drives. This is definitely risky, which is why I
consider it essential to keep a set of all your pictures and videos online in
the cloud.
Uploading photos to the cloud has a couple
of advantages over storing them all locally:
1. You can easily share the albums with
others
2. You can access the photos and videos at
any time and usually on other devices as long as you have an Internet
connection
3. You have a backup of all your photos in
case something happens to your local copy
I always have a local copy of my pictures
and then have several copies stored in the cloud. Depending on what services
you currently use, the best solution may be different for different people. In
this article, I’ll try to cover some of the main ways to store your
photos
Before we get into
details, I wanted to talk about the source for all these photos and videos. In
my case, there are basically three ways I take photos:
1. From my smartphone
2. From my digital SLR camera
3. From my digital point-and-shoot camera
Photos
and Videos from Smartphones
Storing photos and videos you take from a
smartphone in the cloud is pretty straight-forward and there are a lot of
options. For Android or iOS devices, you can use a variety of apps or built-in
features to upload your photos and videos to the cloud, usually automatically.
Apple has iCloud Photo Library and it
works fairly well most of the time. I’ve been using it for several years now
and haven’t run into any major issues. All you have to do is purchase some
extra iCloud storage and your media will be uploaded automatically once the
feature is enabled.
For non-Apple users,
there are quite a few options. The most popular choices here are Google Photos,
Dropbox, OneDrive or Flickr. The Google Photos app is my favorite and I use it
in addition to purchasing iCloud storage.
If you don’t use Google Photos or Picasa ,
etc., you can also use Dropbox. Dropbox is a service that basically lets you
easily “drop” files into a bucket that is then available on any device or
computer you have Dropbox installed on. And Dropbox has an app for every
platform out there, including Linux, Blackberry, Kindle Fire, etc.
Dropbox also has an automatic upload
feature called Camera
Upload, which does the exact same thing as the Google Photos
app. Any picture you take will be automatically uploaded to your Dropbox
account when you open the app. OneDrive also works in the same way.
So these apps can basically take care of
all your photos from any smartphone you own. They work on tablets, smartphones,
desktops and on many other devices too.
If you install the desktop program on your
Mac or PC, it will then automatically sync all those photos and videos to the
computer too, so you have an extra backup on your hard drive just in case.
There are other apps like Facebook, but it
doesn’t support automatic uploading of photos and videos. Still, I do upload
photos to Facebook all the time, but I use Google Photos and Dropbox to store
all my photos whereas I upload only a few good ones to Facebook. Facebook is
not setup to be used as a backup of all your photos and videos.
Photos
and Videos from Digital Cameras
Getting photos from your digital camera to
the cloud is a little different, but not very complicated either. You pretty
much have all the same options as mentioned above. The only issue with SLRs is
that the files can be huge, especially for things like 4K video.
If you have a high-speed Internet
connection that isn’t metered, then you can just drop all the files into one of
your cloud synced folders and everything will be uploaded. If you are in the
Apple ecosystem, you will need to use the Photos app in OS X to import the
media into your iCloud Photo Library. However, large video files will quickly
eat up your storage space.
Overall, it’s a good idea to store your
photos and videos in the cloud along with having a local backup copy
