Take a lot of pictures lately? Find yourself running out of space on your iPhone? Things don’t have to be this way. There are a bunch of great services you can use to continually back up the photos from your Camera Roll, so you can free up local storage space and rest assured that your photos are safely stashed away in the cloud, and easily accessible from anywhere. Here are six of our favourites to help you do just that.
If you don’t care to add an extra app to your home screen to handle photo backups, you can use the built-in solution on your iOS device. Simply navigate to Settings > iCloud > Photos and enable My Photo Stream to have all images from your Camera Roll backed up to your iCloud account.
Back up your photos with iCloud
You can then access these images using the iCloud Control Panel app on your Windows or using iPhoto on your Mac. iCloud users get 5GB of free storage on signing up and can score additional storage (up to 50GB), starting at approx. $20/year for 10GB. If you’re keen on more free space, you can use this trick that involves manually setting up iOS Shared Photo Streams which don’t count against your iCloud storage.
Perhaps the most popular of third-party storage apps on the planet, Dropbox’s mobile app includes a Camera Upload feature that stores all your photos and videos in your account automagically. To configure it, launch the app, tap Settings and enable Camera Upload. If you share photos often, you’re in luck — Dropbox has a free companion app called Carousel (which we covered when it launched) that plugs into your account and lets you easily share entire groups of photos from life events and even download friends’ photos to your Dropbox storage.
Dropbox’s Camera Upload feature
Dropbox affords users 2GB of free space on signup, but allows for up to 3GB of extra storage for Camera Upload content in 500MB increments (granted each time you upload 500MB of photos). If you need more room, you can sign up for 100GB at $99/year. What’s neat about Dropbox is that it installs as a local folder on your Mac or PC, and syncs uploaded images to your desktop for easy access.
Although it seems like Yahoo! hasn’t been getting anything right lately, they’ve actually still got a great trick up their sleeve in the form of Flickr. The mighty photo sharing network offers users a a nifty app for shooting, editing and sharing photos from your device with a whopping 1TB of free storage!
Auto Upload your photos with Flickr
To let Flickr take care of your photos, launch the app, tap the right-most icon to visit your profile, then tap Settings and turn Auto Sync on, and voila! Instant near-infinite backup for your photos! There’s also an iPhoto plugin for Mac if you’d like to access your photos on your desktop, or you can head over to the site to manage them with powerful tools.
Google’s very own social network may yet have some catching up to do before it makes the big league, but that doesn’t mean its lousy. In fact, it offers some stellar photo management tools and — wait for it — practically unlimited storage for your photos and videos. Of course, there’s a tiny caveat: you actually get 15GB per Google account to share between Gmail, Google Drive and your Google+ photos — but images under 2048x2048px and videos under 15 minutes don’t count towards your storage limit. Additional storage costs $24/year for 100GB, which is a pretty good deal.
Auto-Backup your photos with Google+
To let Google+ do its thing with your pictures, launch the app, tap the hamburger icon to reveal the menu and open Settings > Camera and Photos, and turn Auto-Backup on. You’ll be able to choose whether you want to back up full-size images or smaller ones, and can also take advantage of Google+’s great Auto-Awesome feature, which intelligently highlights only the best photos from your collections to share instantly.
If you’re nervous about the NSA peeking into your private life, consider Jottacloud: this service stores your files in Norway with a Privacy Guarantee and 15GB of free space for your photos, videos and other files. It’s also available on Android, as well as Windows and Mac, so you can sync files across your devices and computers. Extra space will set you back by approx. $20/year for 20GB, with plans for every budget.
Use Jottacloud’s NSA-free storage for total privacy
You’ll be prompted to enable Camera Upload (Jottacloud’s backup feature) when you launch the app, and you can always configure it by selecting Camera Upload from the app menu. Once you’ve set it up, you’ll be able to easily share your files via email using the app’s simple sharing tool.
Last on our list but certainly not the least, Microsoft’s recently rebranded cloud storage offering packs quite a punch. Not only does it offer 10GB of free space (with plans for extra storage starting at a reasonable $25 for 50GB), but it also allows you to resize photos for backup and choose whether to include your videos in the mix.
Get 10GB of free space with OneDrive
To enable OneDrive’s backup feature, fire up the app, tap Settings > Camera Backup and turn it on in the menu. You’ll then be able to access it on your browser, Windows or Mac PC, or even Android and Windows Phone devices.
That’s a wrap, folks! What are your tips for saving space and backing up files on your mobile devices? Let us know in the comments!
