In August 2013, we reviewed the best services for storing your photos in the cloud. Nearly two years later, much has changed. Everpix, our pick for average users, went out of business. Picturelife, our choice for power users, sold itself to StreamNation. And Google+ remains a worthy free choice, even if Google’s plans for photos are very much up in the air. In the meantime, the pace of innovation has slowed to a crawl. Giants like Apple and Amazon have improved their services and lowered prices. But they’ve barely invested anything in resurfacing old photos, or helping you enjoy them. It’s fair to question whether photo storage even makes sense as a dedicated service in 2015.
The thing is, photos are some of the most important files you’ll ever create. We’re taking more photos than ever — an estimated 900 billion photos will be uploaded to the web this year. And billions more live on our camera rolls, waiting for us to back them up, erase them, or — amazingly — simply discard them when we give up and buy a new phone. I’m losing count of the people who tell me that they can’t take any more photos because their smartphones are out of storage space. And yet I can’t fault them — every time I start explaining an "easy" way to back up their photos and free up some space again, I realize it still isn’t easy enough.
But there’s real value in using dedicated photo services. Because auto-uploading features are now standard, I can be confident that whenever I snap a photo, it’s quickly backed up to the cloud. Because photos are a uniquely visual file format, good services have designed apps that are fun to browse and easy to search. (No more rummaging through file folders with arcane names like 1999-Oct-41.) And because photos are a powerful source of nostalgia, some of these apps regularly send me push notifications leading me to favorite old photos I might never have thought to look for again. Most importantly, they allow me to stop using my phone’s camera roll as a default back-up solution, letting me delete photos as needed to free up space.
So which service should you pick? We’ve winnowed out our list of services to consider to a manageable eight, looking for a storage system that best balances power, ease of use, and value. Completists will also want to check out indies like Everalbum, Joomeo, and Shoebox, but my experience with short-lived predecessors like Everpix and Loom has made me wary of recommending them to the masses. As for the more established Adobe Revel — it’s an aggressively meh product and didn’t make the cut.
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