How to share and store photos
If you don’t use a conventional camera any more, chances are all your photos are on your mobile phone. So it’s all the more important to store your precious snaps safely, and have the facility to share them with your favourite people. Here’s how...
Q Where can I share and store photos online? Facebook and Instagram are the most popular, but there are plenty more services you can use, each offering different things in terms of security, photo editing and the size of photos you can share.
Q Is storage free?
Most sites offer some free space, but charge a monthly fee if you need more. among the most generous free accounts are Flickr, with 1tb of storage for individual photos up to 200MB, and Google photos, which offers unlimited storage for photos of up to 16Mp. subscribe to amazon prime, and you get free unlimited storage with prime photos, with no cap on the size of individual files.
Q Why does size matter?
when you upload a picture to Facebook or Instagram, the image is compressed, so there’s less data for the site to store. this reduces its quality, so if you re-download and print the photo, it will look pixellated. on Facebook you can up the resolution of saved pictures by creating a new album and checking the ‘high quality’ box, but you’ll still lose a lot of detail. Google photos also compresses files, up to 16Mp (still large enough to print to 24 x 16in), unless you alter the settings to save them as ‘original quality’.
Q Who can see my photos?
on many sites, including Flickr, smugmug and Instagram, any photos you upload are public, so anyone can see them. they might, for instance, show up in a Google search. If, however, you’d rather they were for certain eyes only, then dive into the settings and switch the album or whole account to ‘private’ before you start uploading. For connected accounts – say, you’ve set up your Instagram photos to automatically upload to Facebook – you’ll need to make both private. If you’re nervous, look to sites like 23snaps, which are designed with privacy in mind. Q How can family and friends access private pics? they can sign up for an account for the same site, and you can grant them access to your photos. or, with sites such as Flickr and amazon’s prime photos, you can share individual photos and albums by sending out a link in an email. prime photos also has a feature called Family Vault, which lets you share your free storage with up to five people. with icloud, you can create a shared album and invite up to 100 people to add photos.