Gadgetory

people take more photos today than at any other time in human history Facebook alone handles over 250 million photo uploads each day over 6 billion photo uploads per month that's a lot of kittens and while we're fortunate in this wonderful digital era that we no longer have to worry about physically storing all of our photos and empty shoeboxes you still need to be choosy about where you're uploading your precious memories I'm Donnell Bell and in this top five I'll be counting down the five best sites for storing and organizing your digital photos selected by CNET's Sharon Vaknin starting off at number five Shutterfly here's a name that's been around since 1999 completely free unlimited storage and they have apps for iOS and Roku and you can even order prints for pickup at Walgreens and Target so what's the catch well Shutterfly makes their real money by selling your photos back to you you've got a winner you want to print out you go through them you can't even read download your photos at full resolution instead you have to pay to have an archived CD sent to you still it's a great option for parents and grandparents who tend to print and share a lot of photos anyway but the limitation still put this on the bottom of our list for something a little less rigid try number 4 photo bucket now as a rule I generally don't trust businesses named after buckets but I guess is better than picture trough or maybe image feed bag for better or worse this is a site that's become the preferred dumping ground for every photo and meme and animated gifs on the web there are nearly 10 billion images hosted on photo bucket and their free account makes it easy to get started great social integration with sites like Facebook and there are paid accounts for people who want to store large collections the bad news is that there are file size limits even for paid accounts so really not a place for the pros also if animated gifs and cutesy photo fluff drive you a little nuts this is not the place for you for the more discerning photographer there's number 3 SmugMug the youngest of all the sites on this list SmugMug is a paid only service that starts at $5 a month for the money you get zero ads unlimited photo uploads and portfolio quality photo galleries needless to say it's a big one with the professional photographers out there partly because it does a great job presenting your photos but also because it allows you to redownload your original images with no hassle my only problem with SmugMug is that is still a relatively young service it's not yet in the too-big-to-fail zone maybe I'm too pessimistic but if my photo service goes broke or gets bought up and put on the Shelf I want to know that there's an army of users out there like me who are ready to raise hell it's great as SmugMug is it would die a relatively quiet death so how about number two Picasa seems fitting that a company like Google obsessed with organizing the world's information would also be great at organizing your photos it's a free service though you can pay a small amount for extra storage it works with a huge variety of image formats including raw and there's a desktop app that works on Mac and PC it's not all roses though first there's the awkward transition of Picasa Web Albums to Google Plus photo albums as Google slowly lumps all of their services under the Google+ umbrella then there's the issue of privacy I know I'm a little paranoid but Google already knows every email I send in every web search I make do I really want them having all of my photos - what's all the geotag location data and everything it's a bit too far for me but at least I know they'll look after my photos as they mine them for information that they can use to sell me things I suspect I have canadian pharmacy written all over me so that brings us to the number one recommended site for storing your photos Flickr free but with plenty of features way too big to fail without riots in the street and it's owned by Yahoo a humble tech company with something to prove unlike Google Yahoo is more than happy to let you share your photo uploads on Facebook or Twitter or WordPress heck they're just happy to have you around Flickr is - Yahoo with Xboxes to Microsoft it's like the only successfully cool product they've ever pulled off and they're not going to risk screwing it up you get excellent privacy controls a huge community that's been growing since 2004 and free account that entitles you to a terabyte of space now you can upload short videos you can redownload your original photos and the mobile app is actually pretty great so there you go five sites for backing up and organizing your digital photos for more in-depth comparison check out Sharon vacuums round up over on SEANET how to and for more top 5 videos like this top 5 cnet.com I'm Donnell Bell thanks for watching