The 9 Best Cloud Storage for Photographers

As a photographer, one of the golden rules is to always back up your photos. And while many of us back up our photos in external hard drives, they don’t last forever. Hard drives can fail, get stolen or become damaged in unlikely events like fires and floods. Our livelihood depends on our photos, so we don’t want to leave it to chance.

Fortunately, there are now many affordable cloud storage solutions for photographers—that allow us to back up our photos off-site. This significantly reduces the chances that we lose our photos, even during natural disasters. We can also access the photos from anywhere, which is hugely convenient.

Not all cloud storage solutions for photographers come with the same features. In fact, there are many variations with different strengths and weaknesses. In the same way that you might have different reasons for using a cloud storage platform, we’ll recommend options that serve different purposes for photographers. Some of the possible use cases are as follows:

1. You’re uploading your photos to the cloud for the main purpose of sharing them with your clients or event participants.
2. You’re looking to free up space on your hard drive, by offloading your files to the cloud storage.
3. You’re already backing up your photos on external hard drives, but you’d like a third backup in the cloud.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the 9 best cloud storage platforms for photographers and talk about the different purposes that they serve.

Honcho

Honcho provides cloud storage for your photos, with the main purpose of sharing them with your clients or event participants. Its offering is unique from all of the other options on this list. With Honcho, you instantly upload your photos while you shoot, and then share the right photos with the right people through AI-powered face recognition. 

Here’s how Honcho works. First, it lets you upload your photos from camera to cloud, while you shoot. This is done by tethering your camera to your smartphone, with the Honcho app installed (available for both iOS and Android). Your photos are automatically transferred to the app and uploaded to the cloud, and they can be instantly viewed in an online gallery. 

Hence, you’re backing up your photos right away, as you take them. This adds an extra layer of safety, in the unlikely event that you lose or damage your SD card.

Once the photos are uploaded, you can share them in two ways—AI-powered face recognition or QR codes. For face recognition, your clients and event participants will just upload a selfie, and Honcho will automatically find their photos by matching them with the selfie. 

This is extremely useful for event, wedding and high volume photography (for example, when photographing marathons or school portraits). It maximizes the impact of your photos because you’re sharing them when people are the most excited to receive them—during the event, not days or weeks after it’s over. And by allowing anyone to find their own photos with AI-powered face recognition, you share the right photos to the right people, automatically. 

Honcho gives you full control over privacy. It lets you password protect the online gallery, so that only selected people have access to it. 

Alternatively, you can blur all of the photos in the gallery. Only photos that are found with face recognition are unblurred, which means you can only see your own photos and no one else’s. Hence, you can freely share the online gallery, while maintaining everyone’s privacy. 

Finally, Honcho makes it easy for you to display a live slideshow of the photos on any screen. It’s a powerful way to add excitement to any event, because there’s just something magical about seeing photos of yourself on a large screen.

With Honcho, photography is more than just capturing moments; it’s about delivering memorable experiences through photography. This allows you to stand out from the competition, close more deals and upsell your clients. 

You can sign up for a free Honcho account and discover how it can transform your photography business.

Google Photos

Google Photos is a popular cloud storage platform and it works well if you’re looking for basic storage or photo sharing features. It lacks some of the more advanced features that professionals might expect, but if you don’t have a large number of photos to back up or share, it’s a good option.

Google Photos is a reliable service that’s accessible through the mobile app or website. It’s fast—photos upload and download quickly, as expected from Google. It presents your photos in a gallery, so you can easily browse them. It shares storage with your Google account, and that comes with 15 GB for free. To add to your storage quota, you can purchase a Google One membership.

We’ve written a separate article on how you can use Google Photos to share photos at events and weddings, by creating a shareable link. However, there are limitations to Google Photos:

1. Unlike Honcho, you cannot instantly upload your photos while you shoot. Hence, you can only upload your photos after the event, which is often too slow. People are the most excited to receive their photos while the event or wedding is happening, not days or weeks after it’s over. By delivering your photos slowly, you miss the window of opportunity to generate excitement and interest in your business.
2. It’s too much work for guests to find their own photos, because they have to scroll through the whole album to pick them out. It’s also too much work for photographers or clients to send only the right photos to each guest.
3. Anyone with access to the album can see all of the photos, which can be a privacy concern. For many events, it’s not appropriate to publicly share all of the photos, and better privacy controls are needed.
4. Google Photos lacks the option to control download sizes, and it doesn’t offer an automatic way to generate versions of your photos at different sizes. This feature adds convenience for your clients and guests, allowing them to download smaller versions suitable for sharing on messaging apps or social media.

If none of these are dealbreakers for you, and you only require basic photo sharing, then Google Photos is a good option to consider.

Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the largest cloud storage and file sharing platforms in the world, with more than 700 million users. While it’s not specifically designed for photographers, it can do well enough for the following use cases:

1. Deliver photos to your clients.
2. Free up your local storage by offloading your files to Dropbox.

Let’s talk about these two use cases.

Since Dropbox is designed for file sharing, it means that you can use it to deliver photos to your clients. There are several layout options for photos, including list, grid and large grid modes. The grid and large grid modes present your photos in a basic gallery, which is a better way to browse the photos. 

You can limit access to a folder to just invited people, or set a password for the folder—these are great privacy settings to have.

However, Dropbox has many of the same limitations as Google Photos. That’s why many photographers still opt for other client galleries when delivering their photos, with advanced features designed specifically for them. It ultimately depends on your requirements—if you need a basic solution, both Google Photos and Dropbox work well.

Dropbox is also great for offloading your files, in order to free up your local storage space. Since it supports a wide range of file formats, you can upload both RAW or JPEG files. Dropbox is a fast and reliable service, and files upload and download quickly. You can access your photos from anywhere, in the mobile app or website.

That said, Dropbox is expensive if you have a lot of photos. After all, you’re paying for the ease of use and accessibility. In fact, their personal plans only go up to 3 TB of storage, which might not be enough if you’re an established photographer. If you’re looking at cloud storage mainly to offload or back up your photos, there are other more affordable options, which we’ll explore further down this list.

iCloud

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, you’ll have an iCloud account. You can use iCloud in a similar way as Dropbox, to share photos with your clients and offload your files to the cloud. 

Sharing your photos with iCloud is a more complicated process compared to Google Photos or Dropbox. First, you can only do it in the Photos app, on your iPhone, iPad or Mac. This is not something that you can do on the website, so you’re restricted to working with Apple devices.

In the Photos app, create a Shared Album and upload your photos. If you’d like to create a link to access the album, go into the Shared Album settings. Turn on the option for Public Website, and you’ll get a link which you can send to your clients.

When your clients open the link, they can view the photos in the browser. Unfortunately, they do not have the option to download the photos from the public website, which is usually a dealbreaker. 

The other option is to invite your clients to the Shared Album, via email address or phone number. This works well if they are also iCloud users—they will then be able to view and download the photos within their Photos app. This can be very convenient for your clients, but only if they are also using an Apple device.

The other use case for iCloud is to offload your files to the cloud, in order to free up your local storage space. This will cost you though—the pricing is similar to Dropbox. That said, iCloud offers larger storage plans of up to 12 TB. 

We think iCloud is a good option if you just need basic photo sharing or cloud storage, or if you’re already in the Apple ecosystem and you value that convenience greatly. If you need more storage, iCloud gets pricey very quickly, and there are better options on this list.

Amazon Photos

If you’re an Amazon Prime member, Amazon Photos is an interesting option to consider. You get unlimited full-resolution photo storage for free, as well as an additional 5 GB for video storage. It’s a great option for backing up both your RAW and JPEG files, all at no extra cost. 

You can access Amazon Photos through the mobile app (available on iOS and Android), website or desktop app. On mobile, there is the option to automatically upload all of your photos to the cloud, similar to other services like Google Photos, Dropbox and iCloud. Of course, the advantage is unlimited storage, so you don’t have to worry about unnecessary photos eating up your cloud storage space.

For photographers, what’s more important is backing up the photos on your desktop—that’s where we usually keep our professional work. You can do that via the desktop app, and there are two ways that you can approach this:

1. Manually select the photos you want to upload. Once the photos are uploaded, you can delete them safely to free up your hard drive.
2. Select a folder to continuously back up. When you make changes to the folder, such as adding or deleting photos, those changes will be automatically backed up in Amazon Photos. This means that you won’t be able to delete the files from your hard drive, because doing so will also delete the files in Amazon Photos.

Hence, Amazon Photos is useful for both offloading your files to the cloud to free up your hard drive, or having an additional copy of your files in the cloud for peace of mind.

Adobe Creative Cloud

If you’re a professional photographer, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re already using Adobe Creative Cloud. Their plans include free cloud storage for photographers, and the amount of space depends on the plan you’re subscribed to. For example, the photography plan comes with 20 GB of cloud storage, which really isn’t much—but you have the option to upgrade to 1 TB of storage.

The advantage of using Adobe Creative Cloud’s storage is convenience. If you’re already using Lightroom or Lightroom Classic, this provides an automatic way to back up your photos, along with the edits that you make. This also allows you to sync your edits if you’re using Lightroom on different devices. For example, you can make edits on-the-go with your phone, and resume editing on your desktop when you get home.

Most photographers don’t know this, but you can also share your photos with Creative Cloud by creating a link. Anyone with the link can view and download your photos in the browser, even if they don’t have a Creative Cloud subscription. Hence, it’s useful for delivering photos to your clients.

In summary, Creative Cloud is a good option for sharing and backing up your photos, if you’re already a subscriber. 

Backblaze

If you have a large number of photos not just on your desktop, but also on external hard drives, and you want a way to back up all of those files, Backblaze is one of the most recommended solutions for photographers.

Backblaze automatically backs up your computer and external hard drives with the desktop app, which runs in the background. If you add or change any files, it’s automatically detected and backed up in the cloud. You don’t need to pick files or folders, it backs up everything—including multiple external drives.

While the app is constantly running in the background, it’s optimized so that it uses less than 1% of your CPU and memory on average. That said, it will take quite some time to upload all of your files to Backblaze when you set it up for the first time. 

The disadvantage of Backblaze is that the files are not as easily accessible, compared to a service like Dropbox. With Dropbox, you pay for the ease of use and accessibility of the files. With Backblaze, the value isn’t really in accessing the files from anywhere—it’s in backing them up for the unlikely event that you lose them.

If you do need to access your files from the cloud, you can do it through their mobile app or website. They even have the option to ship a hard drive to you if you need to restore a large number of files (for example, if your hard drive fails), which can take a long time to download from the cloud. 

In short, Backblaze is a safeguard against hard drive failure, and it’s a great way to have a third backup for all of your files in the cloud. Its pricing is much cheaper compared to services like Dropbox or iCloud, and it provides unlimited data backup.

iDrive

iDrive has a very similar value proposition to Backblaze, which is to back up all of your photos—whether they are on your computer or external hard drives. That said, there are a couple of differences in their offerings:

1. iDrive allows you to back up multiple computers, while Backblaze limits you to one computer per license. In addition, iDrive also lets you back up your iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Hence, if you want an all-in-one solution for all of the devices you own, iDrive is the better option. 
2. Unlike Backblaze, iDrive doesn’t offer unlimited storage—their plans start at 5 TB. If you have a huge amount of files, Backblaze can work out to be the cheaper option.

Apart from that, there are also differences such as support for Linux (which only iDrive offers) and the user experience for their desktop apps. If you’re looking for a way to back up all of your files in the cloud, you’d want to dive deeper into either Backblaze, iDrive or other similar competitors (like Crashplan or Carbonite).

SmugMug

SmugMug is a client gallery platform built specifically for photographers. It’s a good option if you’re looking to share photos with your clients, since the photos are displayed in an online gallery which you can customize—by changing the theme, background and layout. You can offer different photo sizes for download, apply a watermark to your photos and password protect your galleries.

In addition, SmugMug lets you sell your photos, either as prints or digital downloads. Since they have print partners, you don’t have to manage the printing yourself—orders are automatically sent to the print partners, who will handle the printing and shipping for you. 

Finally, SmugMug also offers backup for your RAW files, with plans that start at 512 GB. You can upload your photos to their cloud storage through their mobile or desktop apps, or with their Lightroom plugin. With the desktop app, you can manually upload the files or use the folder-watch feature—so that any changes in the folder are automatically synced to the cloud. The convenience comes at a relatively high price—SmugMug’s cloud storage is similar in pricing to services like Dropbox and iCloud.

SmugMug’s value is in its all-in-one solution for photographers. You can share and sell your photos, and also offload your files to the cloud or back them up with folder-watch. It’s a robust solution that can get pricey—but for professional photographers, it might be a good trade-off for the convenience and peace of mind.