With the rise in digital photography, made all the more accessible by mobile phones we can at times find ourselves inundated with photos. But what is the best way to store and share your images? There is an overwhelming amount of options available to you and this handy guide aims to cut through the maze of choices.

External Hard Drives

High capacity external drives are one solution with a dizzying 3TB drive now available for just under the £100 mark. These are a great if you just want somewhere to keep your images; however as with all things computer related there is the potential of them failing or becoming outdated.

Cloud Photo Storage

A better solution by far would be to subscribe to a cloud service. Simply, a cloud service hosts all your data, giving you all the convenience of an external hard drive without the cost and the need to update the hardware. They require very little effort to set up and the photos are backed up automatically or at the click of a button at most. There are several providers out there from the Google’s offering of Drive to probably the most popular service  Dropbox. With a range of plans to suit everyone needs, Dropbox’s free account equips you with 2GB of space, with a paid account giving up to a 500GB. Dropbox has an auto sync feature, which means that any pictures that you take with your smartphone will be backed up and synced with your computer within seconds. It also gives you the ability to share chosen files with friends and family, while ensuring that you are still in full control of the privacy options.

Social Media Sites

It would be hard to ignore the draw of social media sites, especially with the ease of which they allow you to share your photos and photo galleries with family and friends. The obvious choice for this would be Facebook although there have been constant media reports regarding privacy and who actually owns the rights to content. That leads us to Flickr and Picasa, which are both a happy half way house between photo storing and sharing. They have tools for editing and managing your photos, with flickr offering a massive 1TB of space with their free account.

However you choose to tackle the problem of storing and sharing your pictures; the wealth of options means it has never been easier to find a solution that suits your individual needs with a minimum of effort.

If you need any help with the above please contact lindsay@reddesk.co.uk

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