Flickr, Google Photos, Photobucket and more: Which photo storage service is right for you?

Editors’ note, May 16, 2015: This guide has been updated to include new storage options.

If you’re like many others, you habitually turn to Facebook when you want to share photos online. Arguably, that’s perfectly fine — after all, your photos are not only stored in a place you access often, but are quickly shared with friends and family who use the social network (so, basically, everyone).

The downside? Facebook doesn’t offer much beyond tagging, likes, and comments. What if you want to order prints? Or search for photos by date, name or tag? Most importantly: what happens if you ditch Facebook and close your account?

The benefits of storing and sharing your photos on a dedicated photo storage site are clear. Not only do these services offer more robust organizational tools, editing and privacy options, but you also have the option to order prints, and, for the avid photogs, sell your prints to the masses. They also act as a central place to wrangle and backup photos from your phone, tablet and camera into a single photo library.

In this guide, we’ll compare five of the most popular photo-sharing and photo storage sites, and take a look at some advanced solutions for professional photographers who are looking for more storage and flexibility.

But first, a word to the wise: If you upload your photos to the cloud and the company you use shuts down, you may lose your photos too. This isn’t a common occurrence, and most services give you a heads up if they will cease operations, but it’s smart to keep a backup of your photos on your computer or an external hard drive.

Dedicated photo storage services

	Flickr	Google Photos	Amazon Prime Photos	Photobucket	ThisLife
Free plan	1TB of storage	Unlimited storage for photos and video*	Unlimited photo storage and 5GB for video with Prime subscription	2GB + 8GB with the mobile apps	Unlimited photo storage
Paid Plans	Ad Free for $5.99/month, 2TB for $499/year	100GB for $1.99/month, 1TB for $9.99/month	$12 per year without subscription	Starts at 20GB for $2.99/month	Video only: 60GB for $20/year, 30GB for $50/year, Unlimited videos for $140/year.
File types	JPEG, GIF and PNG	JPEG, TIF, TIFF, BMP, GIF, PSD (Photoshop), PNG, TGA and some raw	JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and some raw	GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG	JPEG
File size limits	Photo: 200MB, Video: 1GB	Photo: 75MB, Video: 10GB	Photo and Video: 2GB	Free plan: 5MB	Video: 2GB
Bandwidth limits	None	None	None	10GB/month with free plan, Unlmited with paid plans	None
Apps	iOS, Android, Mac and Windows	iOS, Android, Mac** and Windows**	iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Mac and Windows	iOS, Android, Mac and Windows	iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Mac and Windows

*For photos smaller than 2,048px and videos shorter than 15 minutes.

**The Picasa desktop app.

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Flickr

One of the top names in photo storage, Flickr has evolved significantly in the last few years to add more features and a new layout. The service offers a lot of flexibility to how you can use it. Storage-seekers can organize their photos into albums (dubbed “sets”) and further organize those albums into collections. Those who want to dig deeper can take advantage of features like groups, tagging, commenting, geotagging, social sharing, printing, and even statistics. Flickr also provides Web-based editing for cropping and things like red-eye removal.

Flickr recently introduced two new tools, Camera Roll and Uploadr, aiming to modernize how you organize your photos. Camera Roll is a chronological feed of your photos, just like you’ll see in the iOS Photos app. You can scroll through months and years to find the photos you want. The new Magic View categorizes your images by subject, so you can browse by photos of landscapes, food, animals, children, portraits and more. Uploadr is a desktop tool for Mac and Windows that uploads photos from any folder on your computer or an external hard drive connected to your computer. Both tools are still in beta.

You get a whopping 1TB (yes, terabyte) of free storage, enough for 500,000 photos, for free. Each photo you upload has a generous 200MB size limit and videos can be up to 1GB or 3 minutes long. You can upload and download images in their full original resolution.

Flickr offers two paid plans, one that removes ads and one that offers more storage. For $6 per month (£4, AU$8, converted) or $50 per year (£31, AU$62, converted), you get all of the features in a free account, but with no ads. If you seek more storage, the $499 (£317, AU$620, converted) plan (yes, you read that right) gives you 2TB of photo and video storage. That plan is obviously best left to serious photographers who need the space, since most people won’t ever make much of a dent in the free 1TB offering.

Where it excels

• 1TB of free storage.
• Easily configured privacy settings.
• Fine-tuned organizational tools.

Where it falls flat

• The website design mixes sleek, new design with dated, confusing features.
• Uploading photos and organizing albums can be a frustrating experience as you try to navigate Flickr’s many different menus and tools.

Finally, there’s no support for raw files or animated GIFs.

Best for: Those who want flexibility in how they organize their photos and want to belong to a community of other photographers.

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Google Photos

Google’s photo storage options aren’t as clear-cut as the rest. First, there’s Picasa, a desktop app that organizes the photos on your computer and can back up those files to the cloud. Then there’s Google Photos, a service built into Google+ that uses Picasa’s technology. If you’re looking for old-school tools, like burning photos to a disc or batch editing, Picasa can help you out. But if you simply want to back up your photos online and share them, Google Photos is the way to go. We’ll focus on that service here.

For Google Photos, you’ll head over to your Google+ account and upload photos from your computer. Alternatively, you can automatically upload photos from your phone or tablet with the Google+ apps for Android and iOS. The service then works some magic to highlight your best photos, enhance them to look even better, stitch them together to create panoramas or create GIFs, where possible. It does all of that on its own, so all you have to do is upload your photos to get those effects.

You get 15GB of free storage, but you share that with your Gmail and Google Drive storage. Luckly, photos you upload that are 2,048×2,048 pixels or smaller, and videos that are shorter than 15 minutes, don’t count towards your storage limit, so you get some flexibility here. If you’re looking upload long videos or large photos, you can pay for extra storage, either $1.99 (£1.20, AU$2.50, converted) per month for 100GB or $9.99 (£6, AU$12, converted) per month for 1TB.

Where it excels

• Uploading photos is a breeze with the Photos Web interface.
• The automatic enhancement features require zero effort and produce fun, interesting effects, without overwriting your original images.
• The service offers just enough editing and organizational tools to please most people, but doesn’t overwhelm with printing services or confusing add-ons.
• There’s support for plenty of file types, including PSD, TGA and some raw formats.

Where it falls flat

• Sharing photos isn’t easy, unless you’re sharing to Google+, which is the default.
• You’ll need to set the photos to a Public privacy setting for others to see them, unless they are connected to you on Google+.

Best for: Anyone who already uses Google products, especially Google+ and Android, since Photos is built into the mobile OS.

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Amazon Prime Photos

Included with an Amazon Prime subscription, Prime Photos gives you unlimited photo storage and space for up 5GB of video or non-photo images, like documents. The service is part of Amazon’s cloud storage service Cloud Drive.

Photos you upload can be organized into albums, though by default Amazon organizes them chronologically. You can’t do much with photos shared in Cloud Drive besides sharing them in an email, posting to them Facebook or downloading to your computer or device. The no-frills approach makes Cloud Drive simpler to use than other services on this list. Instead of bombarding the service with extras, Amazon lets you connect your library to third-party apps to order prints, edit the photos or create photo gifts.

There’s apps for PC, iOS, Android and Kindle Fire to upload and view your photos, or you can do so on Amazon’s website. The mobile apps have an automatic backup feature that uploads any new photos you take.

Without a Prime subscription, the Unlimited Photos plan costs $12 per year and there’s a three-month free trial. In the UK, you’ll need to pay for extra storage if you need it, starting at £6 per year for 20GB. In Australia, extra storage starts at $10 per month.

Where it excels

• There are no unnecessary features to navigate; you merely get simple storage for your photos, so you can view them from any device with an Internet connection.
• The service is included with a $99 Prime subscription, so if you’re already paying for that, you get free unlimited storage.

Where it falls flat

• The organizational tools are limited and there’s no search.

Best for: Someone who wants the simplest storage option, with few features to navigate or learn.

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Photobucket

Nearly 10 billion hosted photos says it all: Photobucket is popular. It offers unlimited photo and video storage (with file size limits), album organization, Facebook integration, and mobile apps.

As a social-rich platform, Photobucket gives you plenty of ways to share photos with specific friends and social networks. The service autogenerates URLs for sharing and embedding your photos. That makes Photobucket a great choice for hosting photos you want to share online on a blog or in a forum.

The built-in editing tools offer tools to crop and adjust brightness, or apply fun effects like filters, frames and stickers. You can also purchase paper or canvas prints, create photo books, print your photos on phone or tablet cases, make calendars and other gifts.

Photobucket offers several plans,starting with the free 2B plan with a 10GB bandwidth limit for linking your images around the Web. You can get 8GB of free storage if you download and use the mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Paid plans range from a 99 cents per month (£0.60, AU$1, converted) ad-free, 2GB option, all the way up to a 500GB storage limit for $40 per month or $400 per year (£25, AU$49, or £250, AU$500, converted).

Where it excels

• Photobucket’s social focus makes sharing photos with friends, family and social networks dead simple.
• Photo editing and complementary mobile apps make it easy to access and manage your photos, no matter where you are.

Where it falls flat

• The site hits you over the head with social features.
• The community is saturated with teenagers hosting GIFs and cutesy photos for their LiveJournal or Tumblr blogs.

Best for: People want to share their photos easily on social networks and blogs.

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ThisLife by Shutterfly

Well-known photo printing service Shutterfly has a dedicated storage service called ThisLife. With it, you get unlimited uploads for as many images as you want at no cost. However, if you want to upload videos too, you’ll need to pick a paid plan, which start at $20 per year (£12, AU$24, converted) for 60GB of storage, or roughly 1,000 videos and go up from there. Videos can’t be bigger than 2GB each.

The main Library view shows a clear timeline of your photos and you can also view them plotted on a map or by tags. The Highlights view, which you can toggle on and off, shows what ThisLife thinks are the best photos in your collection.

From your library, imported and uploaded photos can be organized into albums (called Stories), cropped or shared. You can also order prints or create other photo gifts, like books, mouse pads, mugs or totebags.

A great feature is creating a joint account, where you can share the same account with someone else. Both people can upload photos, keeping a constantly-updated collection. The service will also import your photos from Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, SmugMug and Picasa and continue to add new photos when you add to those services.

There are mobile apps for Android, iOS and Kindle Fire, all of which automatically upload photos you take with your phone so you never lose them. There’s also a desktop uploader that grabs photos from your computer.

Where it excels

• The site’s clean design is a breeze to navigate and organizing your photos it a snap.
• The full-size photo pages show all available metadata.
• Joint accounts let you and someone else share photo libraries, which is great to wrangling family photos.

Where it falls flat

• ThisLife doesn’t offer any editing tools, other than crop.

Best for: Those who want to turn their stored photos into prints, books and other photo gifts.

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Cloud storage sites

The services listed above are all designed explicitly for hosting photos, but they aren’t the only choice if you want to keep your photos backed up somewhere online. Cloud storage sites, including Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive can all act as a home for your photos, as well as other types of files.

They offer generous storage space for around $10 monthly, rarely have file size limits, let you download photos to any device and offer sharing options and public links, so that you can share photos with friends and family. Check out CNET’s full guide to cloud storage services for more info.

However, most of these services won’t let you edit photos, or organize them into albums, but some offer a few extra features. Dropbox, for example, has a standalone photo-focused app called Carousel, designed for simple photo sharing that backs up your photos to your account automatically.

Apple also has its own cloud photo and file storage system, iCloud Drive, that can backup the photos you take with your iDevices into the cloud. We’re not diving into the service here, but you can a full rundown of iCloud Drive and iCloud Photo Library in CNET’s guide.

Advanced options for professionals

Catering to a niche of pro photographers and the image-savvy, a handful of Web sites offer more robust photo storage platforms that accommodate a wider range of file types, sizes, and super high-resolutions.

Some of these sites, like 500px and SmugMug, even allow you to sell prints and host your photos in customizable image galleries that are pleasing to the eye.

Topping the list of premium photo storage sites are 500px, SmugMug, PhotoShelter and Zenfolio. All but 500px require paid memberships, and those that do offer free trials.