MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Spurred on by another thread re external drives by current back up solution is supplied by Apple's time capsule function and an external drive.
I've been meaning to transition a back up of my photos to a cloud solution, probably iCloud, for some time.
I don't have storage capacity issues on any device and the back up would be a get out of jail free card rather than go to for storage.
Here is the silly q ..... is stuff stored like for like or compressed in some way? If I lost **touches wood** all my photos would I be able to access them in their original format?
Depends on how you choose to store them and how much you want to pay. Most 'free' stuff is fine for happy snaps and camera phone videos but if you want decent quality to be preserved you normally have to pay.
I wait to be corrected by a photographer who has actually used this stuff. I just have free stuff like Google photos
Google photos free version is compressed, if you want to store the originals you have to pay as WCA says. It's a size issue - you can get some free storage but the more you want / need, the more it will cost
I got a lifetime subscription to pCloud. Seems ok.
As above, you generally need to pay for original quality storage but I think it's worth it. We use Google One and it auto syncs with selected folders on our PC. I find the pricing model a bit shonky though - the jump in storage sizes goes from 200GB to 2TB - and we have about 230GB of data so need to pay for the 2TB plan which is a big jump in cost.
Amazon photos is free for photos in original format (this hay be a prime benefit, I'm not sure).
5gb limit for other "stuff" Iirc, that doesn't last long if you accidentally upload a few videos.
Prime photos doesn't count Raw files and jpegs towards your storage limit. I've got 750gb of Raw and Jpegs up there and it showing as 1gb used on my quota which is used by a couple of video files.
Google photos you can either have as much as you like compressed (I think it’s something like over 12MP it kicks in, so not an issue for most snapshots) or save uncompressed but it comes off your storage quota - you don’t get a lot for free and it’s shared with your gmail mailbox and other services.
iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive etc all store the original file as-is.
As dangeourbrain says - Amazon Photos is 'free' and unlimited for Prime members photos - no compression either.
I would have thought that there's a difference between photo hosting and photo storage.
If you want to upload your photos for the world to see (and hotlink into STW) then it makes sense for the images to be reduced in resolution and / or resampled in a lossy manner. This sort of thing isn't supposed to be a backup solution.
If OTOH you want to back up your photo collection I would be very disappointed indeed in any solution that took bitmaps or raw files and helpfully converted them into .jpgs for me. It's possible to compress files without losing data - as well as proper backup solutions this is exactly what Winzip, WinRAR and a supporting cast of a thousand other apps all do.
Bottom line - check with your chosen provider before committing.
Oh, and don't migrate to an online solution instead of a local backup. Do both.