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It’s easy to end up with thousands of pictures on your devices nowadays. Most smartphones come with excellent built-in cameras, and if you love taking photos it’s natural that you’ll quickly fill your phone’s memory and SD card. This gives you the problem of where to store and organize your photos. From your smartphone’s gallery to hard drives, SD cards, and more, it’s challenging to know where everything is. Moreover, there’s a high chance of losing all your pictures if a device breaks.
Some people believe that using Facebook and Instagram is a great way to save their pictures. However, that’s not entirely true. While your photos will be secure on these social media platforms, their quality won’t be as high as desired since the websites automatically downsize photos to improve loading speed. This transformation might not be big enough for you to notice on your smartphone’s screen, but if you decide to download your pictures to print them later, you’ll notice that their quality is far from ideal.
Considering all of this, you might prefer to go for a more bulletproof option, such as storing your pictures on a cloud-based service or printing them.
Cloud-based photo storage services allow you to save your pictures online and offer tools to easily organize your pictures. Like current smartphones, some providers automatically arrange photos by date, color, or concept. You can also create folders the same way you would do on a computer and organize pictures by events like your last road trip or birthday party.
The best part is the high number of free options available. One of the most generous is Google Photos that provides unlimited storage space at zero cost. However, it’s essential to bear in mind that Google scans stored pictures to deliver targeted advertising. For example, if you upload a photo of your kids, it’s almost certain that you’ll start getting ads for children’s toys when browsing the web. Fortunately, other options – such as Dropbox and Apple Photos –don’t do this but they do have limited storage space.
Another alternative is to pay for a cloud-based service. In this case, you don’t need to worry about your photos being used by advertising companies, as the online photo storage providers make their money through subscriptions. Moreover, since it’s a paid platform, you can also count on more advanced features, such as a built-in photo editor.
On top of your information being sold to advertisers, there are other things to consider when storing your pictures on the cloud. One of the most important is security – hackers are everywhere, and they may try to gain access to your storage account. Luckily, a strong and unique password will keep them at bay. We recommend using a password manager for this, as most providers offer password generators that can create a password with over 50 characters instantly. There are even decent free options that you can use, such as Enpass.
When uploading sensitive pictures that you don’t want anyone to see, we also recommend using a VPN. Even though most websites use secure connections through SSL, there’s still a possibility of eavesdroppers getting access to the content you’re uploading. This is especially true when using public Wi-Fi or mobile data. If you connect your device to a VPN, everything will be encrypted right off the bat, and you can be sure nobody will be able to get a glimpse of what you’re doing online.
Another way to protect your photos is by printing them. Of course, we don’t recommend printing all your selfies as that would turn into quite an expensive process. Instead, create photo books for special occasions – your wedding, your baby’s first year, or even a project that you’re proud of. This is the perfect solution to safeguard your photos for years to come, as it’s less likely something will happen to them.
There are even photo book builders, such as Snapfish and My Social Book, that upload pictures directly from your smartphone and temporarily store them for you to build your photo book stress-free.
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