01 Jan Comparing 5 Free Photo Backup Services
January is a great time for new beginnings. What would be better than deciding on a backup strategy for your phone photos? After all, who DOESN’T take pictures with their phone?
There are several parts to a complete digital backup system. This blog will concentrate on backing up the photos from your phone to a cloud service. I will compare five cloud service options, taking into consideration Ease of Use and Pricing:
1) Ease of use – All of these options allow for automatic backups from your phone.
a. Apple iCloud automatically backs up ALL the files from your Apple devices – including photos. But be aware, that this is a not specifically a photo backup system. It is meant for synching photos across devises. It does not have capabilities such as facial recognition.
b. Google Photos: Google recently separated Google Photos from Google Drive. This means that photos in Google Photos will be organized chronologically based on the date they were taken, and will no longer be available automatically in Google Drive. This is fine for digital photos. However, the date captured for older, scanned, photos would be the scan date. Also, Google Photos compresses photos which are larger than 16 megapixels. Again, this is fine for most cell phone pictures, but is not so fine for photos taken with a camera, especially if taken in RAW format. Lastly, Google Photos will not maintain your folder structure.
c. Amazon’s Prime Photos is tied to Amazon Drive. Amazon Photos retains the original size of the image, and the photos can be organized into directories in Amazon Drive.
d. DropBox is basically a data backup system and does not have capabilities such as facial recognition. DropBox does maintain your folder structure.
e. Microsoft OneDrive has an intuitive interface, so it’s very easy to use. It stores full-size pictures, has photo searching capabilities and maintains your original folder structure.
2) Price and Capacity
a. Apple iCloud provides 5Gb of storage for Apple devices and 1Gb for Android devices for free. If additional capacity is needed, 50 Gb could be purchased for $.99/month for one device; or additional storage could be purchased to share among the family.
b. Google Photos provides unlimited capacity for free, for images up to 16 megapixels.
c. Amazon Photos provides unlimited capacity for any size picture for free with Amazon Prime membership.
d. DropBox provides 2 Gb of storage for free, and up to 1Tb for $9.99 per month. DropBox is one of the most secure cloud storage services around.
e. OneDrive offers 5 Gb of free storage, and 1Tb for $69.99 per year.
Taking into consideration the Pro’s and Con’s of the cloud services presented, I would recommend Amazon Photos for Apple users and OneDrive for Windows/Android users.
If you would like help or guidance on photo backup strategies, please contact PreciousMemories at www.PreciousMemsPhoto.com.
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