6 Places to Store Your Photos Online

For any serious photographer, space can quickly become an issue. It doesn’t really matter if you’re computers space is measured in megabytes, gigabytes or terabytes eventually you are probably going to wish your photos were taking up less space. On top of this is the dire need to backup your photos; even if you hadn’t had a bad experience yet with your computer unexpectedly deleting a bunch of your favourite shots let me assure you, it’s not nice.
So you’re left with a few options. You can physically back up your photos, either by having a massive stack of negatives in your room or a second laptop, portable hard drive, series of thumb drives or whatever you want. Or you can do what most people do and back it all up online. But even online there is a myriad of options, so here’s a short list of your options with pros and cons so that you can pick which is right for you.

1. Flickr
Starting with one of the biggest first, Flickr is essentially the Facebook of photo websites. Lots of social links and comment sections with everything built towards sharing your photos with your friends. Great if you want a simple place to show off your photos and link to Facebook or MySpace. Probably not so great if you wanted to professionally show your photos to a potential client. Still, there are a lot of editing and customization options and it is free which is always plus.

2. Smugmug
This is at the other end of the spectrum. A professionally designed site for someone who is looking to generate business off of their photographs. Offers a personal URL and technical support around the clock without the distraction of ads. Not the best place to send your Facebook mates to show them what happened at the party last night but a great place to send clients. Lack of editing tools is a loss but if you are at a professional level you really shouldn’t need them inside of a browser. As expected of a site aiming toward the professional this is a paid website so be prepared to spend.

3. Photobucket
Photobucket is run by News Corp but if you can see past this it’s a nice informal storage space. Not as social as Flickr and not as professional as Smugmug, it offers some nice editing tools and occasional competitions but mostly is just a nice free space on the internet to host your files. It’s probably not a professional front for your business, lots of side ads and the like, but its free and easy to use and a great place for mass uploads to back up your portfolio.

4. Wipasnapa
Wipasnapa is a website which is run as a commercial business and this is pretty obvious from the outset. It’s a nice polished webpage but doesn’t exactly scream corporate professionalism, instead it’s almost designed like an online store with a large and well advertised line of print products for your pictures and a small amount of storage space with premium paid accounts to expand the space you are given. If you have thousands of family photos and want a place to store them where you can turn them into a coffee mug at the drop of a hat, this is probably the place.

5. dotPhoto
dotPhoto is from the same vein as Wipasnapa although they seem to have tried to market it a little more towards professional photographers. Regardless, it comes off as an online photo store with the additional tool of having space to store your photos. This aside, it does serve as a nice portal to store and sell your photos as long as you are happy for all of your sales to go through dotPhoto first and happy to pay their monthly fee for an account.

6. Facebook
Finally we have Facebook, a place where (unfortunately) quite a lot of people store the majority of their photos already. The upside to this is that Facebook is completely free and offers a large (infinite?) amount of space for your photos with albums and tags and lots of social sharing potential. The downside is that Facebook retains the right to use any content uploaded to it for advertising purposes and only recently updated their Terms of Service to stop them owning the royalties to it as well. In short, if you don’t want Facebook using your content without your permission for practically anything they want it’s probably not the best place to store your work.