3 cloud storage apps to store and backup smartphone photos on the go

Dropbox

Although cloud giant Dropbox is about to shutdown Carousel, its dedicated photo storage app, the core app (2GB free, dropbox.com) for iOS and Android remains a great way to offload images as you travel. By enabling Camera Uploads in the photos tab of the app on a phone, every photo you take will be automatically backed up to Dropbox (you can choose to do this only when on Wi-fi ). The drawback is that you have to pay for additional storage space, but Dropbox has just reduced the price to HK$78 per month for a terabyte (as have the other two apps reviewed here). Dropbox is also great for storing boarding passes and other documents for paperless travel.

MiMedia

“The personal cloud you always wanted” is how MiMedia (10GB free, mimedia.com) advertises itself, but there’s more to its service than that.

Like Dropbox it works on phones, tablets and computers, and on iOS and Android, but is designed specifically for photos, videos and music.

Able to find photos you’ve uploaded to places like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, MiMedia is more customisable than Dropbox or iCloud; you can choose to upload only from specific albums.

This great-looking app also makes it possible to share content and even text messages on MiDrive, creating a private social network. And no other app gives you so much storage free of charge.

Apple iCloud Photo Library

What Apple brings to the personal cloud that others do not is slick photo editing. It obviously only works on Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad, but the iCloud Photo Library (5GB free, icloud.com) uploads photos only over Wi-fi, and syncs any crops, touch-ups or edits you apply to all versions on all devices. It can be tricky to use at first, primarily because it’s very slow to upload photos to the cloud. It also puts low-resolution versions of every photo it contains on all of your devices, which can initially be confusing until you understand what it’s doing. However, what it’s actually doing is making travel photography a lot easier.