Where to store photos — an overview of cloud storage | Articles | Photo, video, optics

Every­one who shoots more than once a week soon­er or lat­er faces a prob­lem — there are too many pho­tos. They occu­py the entire hard dri­ve of a com­put­er or lap­top and inter­fere with work. You can, of course, delete old­er footage and spend a lot of time main­tain­ing the archive in order. Anoth­er option is to use cloud stor­age. About how to work with them, what are the pros and cons of this approach, we under­stand in this mate­r­i­al.

The cloud is not only a good sub­ject for a pho­to, but also a good idea for pho­to stor­age / Pho­to: unsplash.com

Yandex.disk
Google Dri­ve
Mail.ru cloud
pCloud
Bro­ken cloud ser­vices
Exter­nal hard dri­ve for back­up

There are dozens of dif­fer­ent cloud stor­ages, we will con­sid­er the most com­mon and sen­si­ble ones in this review.

Domes­tic cloud ser­vice for stor­ing files. By default, it gives 10 GB of free space — this is enough to give the client the processed shoot­ing, but not enough for full-fledged stor­age or back­up.

Yandex.disk inter­face in the brows­er / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

• Cloud size: 200 GB, 1 TB, 3 TB
• Free vol­ume: 10 GB
• Cost: from 126 rubles per 1TB per month (when paid for the year)
• Appli­ca­tion: for Andri­od, iOS, Win­dows, MacOS, Lin­ux
• Is there Russ­ian lan­guage

It is unprof­itable to take a sub­scrip­tion to 200 GB — the vol­ume is small, but they want 999 rubles a year for it. At the same time, for 1799 rubles you will receive five times more vol­ume, and this is already quite inter­est­ing. A ter­abyte cloud is enough for back­ing up espe­cial­ly impor­tant shoot­ings, and for giv­ing away fin­ished pho­tos.

To make it more con­ve­nient to work with the disk on your com­put­er, you can install the Yandex.Disk appli­ca­tion. After that, your dri­ve will be vis­i­ble in Explor­er as a reg­u­lar fold­er. To upload files, just drag them to this fold­er. And new items appear in the con­text menu that allow you to share a link to files and delete them from your com­put­er, leav­ing only in the cloud.

The icons in the cor­ner of the file tell you what has already been uploaded to the cloud and what is wait­ing in line / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Photosklad.Expert

Yandex.disk also has dis­ad­van­tages: in the free ver­sion, you can­not upload files larg­er than 1GB. If you need to share a five-giga­byte video file, you will have to buy a sub­scrip­tion or cut the file into sev­er­al parts

The capa­bil­i­ties and inter­face of Google Dri­ve are very sim­i­lar to Yan­dex. You can upload files by drag­ging them into the brows­er win­dow, or you can install the appli­ca­tion and the cloud will be vis­i­ble as a dri­ve in Win­dows Explor­er.

Google Dri­ve inter­face in the brows­er / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

• Cloud size: 100 GB, 200 GB, 2 TB
• Free vol­ume: 15 GB
• Cost: from 350 rubles per 1TB per month
• Appli­ca­tion: for Andri­od, iOS, Win­dows, MacOS
• Is there Russ­ian lan­guage

If the cloud is only need­ed to share files, the appli­ca­tion can be omit­ted. Well, if you want to auto­mat­i­cal­ly back­up impor­tant files to Google Dri­ve, then you can’t do with­out it.

In the set­tings of the Google Dri­ve appli­ca­tion, you can spec­i­fy fold­ers for back­up, and they will be auto­mat­i­cal­ly syn­chro­nized with the cloud / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

The advan­tages of Google cloud stor­age include the fact that you can add up to 5 user accounts to a paid sub­scrip­tion that will be able to use the stor­age.

By cons — the price, you can find cloud stor­age cheap­er. But the biggest dis­ad­van­tage is that at the moment, due to prob­lems with pay­ment sys­tems, it will not be pos­si­ble to pay for a sub­scrip­tion with a Russ­ian bank card, you can only use free 15 GB.

Anoth­er Russ­ian cloud ser­vice. By default, it pro­vides only 8 GB of free space. There are many tar­iffs (6 reg­u­lar and 4 PRO), and it can be dif­fi­cult for an inex­pe­ri­enced per­son to choose the right one among them.

PRO-tar­iffs are more expen­sive, they allow you to upload large files (up to 100 GB) to the cloud, in the reg­u­lar tar­iff the max­i­mum file size is 32 GB.

Mail.ru Cloud inter­face in the brows­er / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

• Cloud size: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB
• Free vol­ume: 8 GB
• Cost: from 132 rubles per 1TB per month (when paid for the year)
• Appli­ca­tion: for Win­dows, MacOS
• Is there Russ­ian lan­guage

Cloud Mail.ru has a rather inter­est­ing appli­ca­tion called Disk‑O. It dif­fers from sim­i­lar appli­ca­tions in that it allows you to work not only with your native cloud, but also con­nect to accounts in oth­er cloud ser­vices. Yandex.disk, Google Dri­ve, Drop­box, OneDrive, Ama­zon Cloud, Box and oth­ers are sup­port­ed.

After con­nect­ing to cloud stor­ages, they will be vis­i­ble as disks, and you can upload files to the cloud by copy­ing or drag­ging them to the desired disk. If you need to free up space on your com­put­er, you can delete the local files and leave only the cloud copy.

In the Disk‑O win­dow, you can con­nect to cloud dri­ves. In the “pro­tect­ed files” tab, you can select disks and fold­ers for back­up to the cloud / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

The appli­ca­tion has a free ver­sion, but it allows you to work with­out restric­tions only with Mail.ru Cloud. You can upload no more than 10 files per day to oth­er stor­ages. To remove the restric­tion, you will have to pay 899 rubles a year.

A cloud ser­vice pri­mar­i­ly designed to back up impor­tant files to the cloud. There is no web ver­sion, it works only through the appli­ca­tion.

• Cloud size: 500 GB, 2 TB, 10 TB
• Free vol­ume: 10 GB
• Cost: from 50 euros per year for 1 TB
• Appli­ca­tion: for Win­dows, MacOS, Lin­ux, iOS and Android
• Russ­ian lan­guage: avail­able on the web­site, not in the PC appli­ca­tion

After installing the appli­ca­tion and reg­is­ter­ing, the pCloud cloud tra­di­tion­al­ly appears in Win­dows Explor­er as a dri­ve. Free at reg­is­tra­tion they give 10 GB, but only 4 GB of them are imme­di­ate­ly avail­able. The rest need to be unlocked — they will give anoth­er giga­byte for con­firm­ing the mail, one more for installing the appli­ca­tion for Android and one giga­byte for each friend invit­ed to the ser­vice.

In the pro­gram win­dow, you can con­fig­ure fold­ers for back­up / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

For a full-fledged back­up, free space is not enough, you need to buy more. This cloud ser­vice allows you to both buy an annu­al sub­scrip­tion and buy a place on the cloud for life use.

For 99 € you can buy 2 TB of cloud for a year, and for 350 € for­ev­er / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Photosklad.Expert

The test showed that the appli­ca­tion works fine with free giga­bytes. It was not pos­si­ble to find out whether the sub­scrip­tion works with cards of Russ­ian banks — it was a pity to spend 50 euros for ver­i­fi­ca­tion.

There are for­eign cloud stor­ages that, as of July 2022, can­not be paid with a Russ­ian bank card. The most famous of them:

• Drop­box
• Microsoft OneDrive;
• Adobe Cre­ative Cloud.

You can not use cloud ser­vices, but buy anoth­er hard dri­ve. Well, leave the clouds only for exchang­ing small files. Free 10–15 giga­bytes is enough for this.

Let’s see if it’s bet­ter. A hard dri­ve for one ter­abyte now costs 4000–5000 rubles, and two ter­abytes will cost 6–7 thou­sand. For com­par­i­son, one ter­abyte of cloud stor­age on a Yan­dex disk costs 1,790 rubles, and on the Mail.ru cloud it costs 1,595 rubles per year. Thus, if you need to quick­ly get a ter­abyte or two of space, the cloud will be more prof­itable. If we con­sid­er in the long term, then in 2–3 years the cost of cloud stor­age will exceed the cost of a disk of a sim­i­lar size.