Guide to Online Photo Storage and Sharing

Thanks for the useful guide. Which of the above sites allow one to write a caption for the photos? I have some travel photos that I'd like to share with family, but I'd like them to know what they are viewing, and where the shot was taken. 

Is there any online photo share app or website that does not sell your personal information and/ or pictures to third parties. I would like my family to see my kids pictures online but I don't want other people to use the pictures. I appreciate the help. Thanks

Great post, Todd. I'm the founder of PicBackMan where we are building an important piece of the puzzler - the uploader to upload photos in bulk to online accounts. PicBackMan is a multi-service uploader that delivers the fastest way to upload photos and videos to all top online accounts like Flickr, SmugMug, Google Photos, Dropbox, Box, YouTube, Facebook, OneDrive and more. Most importantly, PicBackMan de-dupes photos automatically and uploads with a full folder structure support for services like SmugMug. 

Would love to hear your feedback. You can take PicBackMan for a spin in minutes. 

Are there sites that allow others to view the properties of photos?  Maybe I just don't know how to properly set the security restrictions, but I write descriptions and tags on pictures when I upload them onto my computer, but they aren't accessible when I upload them to share on facebook.  I would like a way to share and store photo albums with family so that they could read the info in the "properties" of the photos if they wanted to find out more about the photo without me having to type the info in for my computer storage and then again as descriptions on facebook or other sharing sites.  Hope that makes sense.

Nice piece. Pretty darn informative. I use PicBackMan as my Primary photo & video uploader. It automatically upload photos and videos from my computer to my multiple cloud accounts, simultaneously. The premium subscription ensures a faster upload with many additional & advanced features like de-duping.

I looked to you for advice on which online storage solution might be best for a photographer with an ever-growing number of photos needing to be saved, accessed, backed-up, shared, etc. Although you discussed some of my alternatives, I still have to do all of the work to compare them to see which is best. A search result from Google will give me a list of choices. I needed a much more in-depth analysis. Who better to turn to than a pre-eminent photography authority, to wit, B&H. Unfortunately the article left me with little more than when I started. That said, I have gotten some great information from your site and have watched some great videos sponsored by you. It's just that this time, for me, you fell short of the mark.

 Thank you for sharing this information about Guide to Online Photo Storage and Sharing.

An important factor is whether they delete your photos after a period of inactivity. I had photos on Adobe Revel, and, since it was only my secondary backup I didn't visit for a period of time and my photos were ALL deleted.

Flickr is great in that you can have automatic backup, but remember they back up every single photo. So if you change a file name or move a photo to another flile they download that too. You end up with so many photos you can't find anything. The organizing and search feature is not seamless. I use Flickr as my secondary auto backup source online and for sharing public photos for online classes I take. I dislike Flickr because if I designate photos as friends/family, all photos designated as such can be seen by all friends/family. You can't set up an album viewable only by a designated person/group. I do like being able to designate a photo as public and still choose not to have it in their public search engine.

I like betterphoto.com because it has deterrents for stealing photos. Members can post pics and make them available for commentary (and it is constructive), enter contests, play tagging games, interact with other members. The downside is it's a paid service but there is no private file sharing. Everyone sees everything on your sharing site.

Shutterfly has an organizing setup almost as good as my PC and unlimited, never deleted storage. Both good things. Share sites are nice but of course if you want pictures you have to order through them and I don't find their prints up to my standard (white balance, exposure, blacks, saturation are all off).

I got frustrated and gave up on setting up on a Zen Folio site. Perhaps if I had been more website savvy I might have liked it and I may try it again in the future.

I use Backblaze as my primary, automatic backup service for my PC. The files are easy to find in their system because the setup mirrors your computer system. Should you need to restore some files or do a total restore they have adequate and simple resources for that too. It gives me peace of mind and at only $5/month my wallet is happy too.

I say try several sites and choose the one that works for you.

Hope this is helpful! 

Good list of providers and considerations, Todd.  But you missed PBase, which was one of the very first photo hosting sites, and it is still around.  (I myself have never used it.)

Olympus' ibonthenet is no more.

Beware of what rights you're handing over to the service. For example, Fujifilm X World may use uploaded content "for any purpose", while Canon Irista specifies that its rights are limited to "everything necessary to provide the service".

It all depends on people's need for the storage. Facebook is completely free, others have some sort of payment plan once you go above a certain amount of storage (i.e. 2GB). Some just need "storage" for keeping photos somewhere they can go look at them anytime they want. Others may need professional storage for the multiple backups they need. Facebook is the worst in my opinion... degrades pictures when uploaded and not much organization available other then creating a new album for every single thing. But great for sharing with friends and family. I think it's replaced the traditional family photo albums for the most part.

Thank you for the information, it gives us a lot of options to consider. :)

Hi, I'm working on a product that you guys might really like. :) Bundle let's you group and manage your photos in a 

shared photo collection with friends and family across several devices. We're not as famous as the big players out there, but I think you will love the quality of our product compared to some of the apps listed above. I know. Shameless plug but you can't blame a man for trying. :) 



Cheers! 

A list of some free sites would also been helpful

Todd - Enjoyed getting info from your list of seven. I'm a long-time user of Smugmug, and I think it has been ranked somewhere as the second-best for its wide variety of excellent features. I "lost" an image file yesterday and downloaded it full-res from my Smug site in a few seconds to make back a complete album. I've sold several thousand $ worth of prints there, too without having to do the printing, mailing, etc.

I think the free sites with unlimited photo storage deserve a critical note if you do this again. The big ones are free or cheap because they have no organizing capability regardless of how you upload. There is no hierarchical tree available, and often no search capability including not even showing the image filename.

Retrievals from a large collection of photos look to me like a nightmare of visual searching one at a time. A prospective user should upload at least 100 photos first and see how to retrieve them. If you know how to do that, it's worth telling us all because so far I've found them worthless.

Apple ICloud is not a true storage photo service. If you delete a photo from your phone it's deketed off ICloud. Apples service us more of a sharing the moment photo service and not a true storage service "yet".

Todd,

With all the online hacking that goes on, would have appreciated comments about how well these sites guarantee privacy so no one will violate the photographer's copyright of his photos.  Which sites offer protection against copyright violations and what kind? Which allow public access to photos so that anyone could download and use a photo?