After having an external hard drive fail with loads of photo’s down the pan, is a cloud the best way to store photos?
I’m on the ‘Canon Image Gateway’ at the moment, which is free as I’ve registered a Canon camera. I’m only loading photos up at the moment & haven’t done owt else on it yet. (I don’t even know what I Can do)
Thoughts?

I have my pics on HD (external) and best ones on Flickr.

I transfer pics from my camera to my phone and then iCloud sorts it all out.

I have my pics on HD (external) and best ones on Flickr.

As above. HD is duplicated to a back up in a separate location fairly often.

Cameras(s) to PC and then automatically backed up to Google Photos. I also have an external HD with a synced copy (using MS SyncToy). Phone pics sync straight to Google Photos .

My pics were on a 1TB WD external HD. Plugged it in to upload some photos &….nowt, It’s knackered. 3 computer people have looked at it & it’s goosed. Don’t want that happenning again.
I can retrieve the stuff on it to the tune of £90.

Yeah- you always want at least two copies. With one in PC, one on external HD and then the Google Photos backup I’m pretty well covered.

“More than one place” is the best place to store anything. Any other answer is Wrong.

Also,

When in doubt, leave the [‘] key alone.

You’re welcome.

(-:

Also,

When in doubt, leave the [‘] key alone.

You’re welcome.

(-:

*scratches head*

Every photo I take goes to google drive in its relevant folder, every digital photo I have ever taken is on there in folders, I pay for 100GB at about £1 a month so far I have used 27% with 15 years worth of photos.

*scratches head*

“photo’s”

(though I concede, it’s arguably valid for a contraction)

Hang on Cougar, your’e bored aren’t you? I said, ‘photos’ 4 times & only the 1st time did I say, ‘photo’s’
Pedantic git! 😉

Guilty as charged. Sorry. (-:

Also, “you’re”.

Be careful where ‘you are’ going with this, my step daughter is an English teacher, I’ll get you back. 😆

Anyway, stick to the subject of cloudy photos!

I’m in the same boat. Store photos on PC harddrive and backup to 1 TB WD NAS drive – this however recently failed so am looking for another backup solution.

Currently using using Flickr which is free and also has a 1TB limit while I consider my options.

I would rather backup to something physical rather than the cloud, but I suppose thats just me being ‘old fashioned’ !

I have my main gallery of photos I want to share on Flickr, but despite their uploader wanting to back up all your photos and let you keep stuff private, it doesn’t support raw files, so no go. I need a back up of everything, raw, unedited, the lot.

So, Office365 subscription which gives me Word, Excel, Outlook etc and includes 1TB storage for fairly much anything. I just keep my photos in a OneDrive folder on my desktop and it syncs it to the cloud. Job done.

OneDrive integrates with the Win 10 Photos app now also and you can create albums with it plus it auto creates them, and you can view all this on the web too.

I split it into different folders for albums and unedited/working folders split by year and then on my tablet I just sync the current year as it doesn’t have enough storage for the entire collection. Plus anything from my phone or from tablet goes into the Camera Roll automatically and synced between devices.

Google Drive is another option and offer “unlimited storage” but there’s a catch in that to use unlimited they downconvert to a lower size if too large and mess about with the files. RAW files I think don’t count in the unlimited storage allowance, so you need enough normal storage and I only have 15GB. Can pay for 1TB which is about the same as the monthly cost of Office365 Home subscription but then Office365 comes will full Office for 5 home users. In fact it’s cheaper if you only need a personal subscription.

Oh, and I sync my OneDrive folder to my NAS also, and that on top is backed up regularly to an external drive. So plenty of back ups, in house and off site 😀

@ Deadkenny. Thanks for that Ken but I’m 60 in 18 days time & I haven’t an effin clue what you’re on about! 😉

Short version 😀 (this depends a bit on you having Windows, ideally Windows 10)…

Set up OneDrive in Windows. You get 5GB by default in this. If this isn’t enough for photos, then…

Buy Office 365 from Microsoft on the web. This upgrades you OneDrive to 1TB of storage in OneDrive. Plenty.

Store your photos in OneDrive.

Job done. They sync to the cloud.

Bonus is that 365 subscription gets you latest Office software too for desktop, tablet and phone, for the whole house.

have onedrive sync speeds improved. last time I tried to use it, it was abysmal. About 1/10th of the speed of upload compared to dropbox.

That was what put me off too.
Mine are on server, NAS and Google drive.

One drive took about 2 days to do what Google drive did in 12 hours.

Or at least. I gave up after 2 days

Crashplan for me, much cheaper than the other cloud services if backup is your goal I found!

One drive took about 2 days to do what Google drive did in 12 hours.
Or at least. I gave up after 2 days

I think know Google drive took a week for me to do about 70gb on 50mb upload speeds. I just left it running in the background no real issues.

I was trialing a 200/200 fibre service. So the problem wasn’t with the network!

I didn’t really see it as a problem, uploading the entire collection is a once thing.

OneDrive is like many of these services and low prioritise uploads. They’re not intended to sync instantly between devices but just get around to it when they can. Keeps the load off servers etc. Anyway, upload 100gb of photos to OneDrive and yeah took around a day to get it all done, but still that’s not bad going considering 20mbps upload.

Sync back down to another device will take a bit longer, but usually it’s in the cloud relatively quick. I only sync back a selection of the latest photos I want to work with though so not so slow.

Dropbox seemed a bit quicker, but their free service was poor in storage limits. Pay service for 1TB is around similar price to OneDrive but lacks the Office subscription. Plus you need to install it for each device, whereas OneDrive is integrated into Windows.

Google Photo is free, up to 16 megapixels.

Amazon Prime Photos is bundled with Prime subscriptions.

AWS Glacier is $0.70/TB/month if you can put up with a more manual upload/want more control and are unlikely ever to retrieve.

Backblaze is $5/month for “unlimited”.

External hard drives and/or NASes are very convenient but vulnerable to theft, fire and ransomware.

…all of which reminds me that I haven’t run a backup this year.

When in doubt, leave the [‘] key alone.

‘photo’s’

As above, second hard drive, Smugmug (just photos) and ADrive (another cloud backup for everything else).

I’m an Apple fanboi, so mine are all in iCloud Photo Library. This means my photo libraries on my iPad, iPhone, and Mac are all the same and kept in sync. The Mac has fully copies of the originals, and the iPad and phone are downloaded on demand.

The Mac is then backed up to a local Time Capsule NAS, specific things like the Photos, iTunes library and documents folder to Dropbox, and the whole disc also offsite using the Crashplan backup service.

Probably costs me a fiver a month for everything.

1. always have a back up on site.
2. always have a back up off site

if you just want to store a backup in the cloud then Backblaze works well. Others are available.

If you want to store the photos and have access as if they were local then any of the drive services like Box, Dropbox, Onedrive etc will do the job. The storage costs though. If you have a mac and have a modest library iCloud storage might work for you 79p/month for 50GB

If instead you want to keep your photos in the cloud for viewing and backup then it depends whether you have just JPEGs or RAW as well.

JPEGs only – loads of choice including Flickr and Google photos. Photo uploads are private by default.

RAW and JPEGs – less choice. Google photos will support RAW if you turn the option on.

I keep RAW and JPEG files on a NAS. I clone the photos volume to a portable HDD that I plug in on occasion and take off site. This portable drive backs up to Backblaze. All the JPEGs upload to Flickr using the Flickr uploader. I run a Lightroom job to convert new RAW files to JPEG so they’re also uploaded to Flickr.

All of our photos are on a 1TB external drive here at home.

My icloud keeps telling me its full, is there a free alternative to the storage demands of my phone?