Given that size of a photo library, let’s take a look at the limitations of each service as an offsite backup solution for photography. In 2018, I added 44,000 photos that take up 1.9 TB+ of space. My current photo library has 130,000+ photos, which take up 3.5 TB+ of space. For the high-volume professional or serious photographer, all of the services fail for one reason or another. For the occasional photographer, the storage provided is probably more than adequate. Online file storage providers have easy-to-use syncing and backup apps that allow you to backup and access photos across all of your devices. However, this strategy doesn’t help with a burglary, electrical surge or fire at my house, so offsite backup is needed. I’m also pretty good about keeping a second copy of the photos on another drive at my house. I use Lightroom to organize and process my photos, and I protect against disk failure by storing my photos on a redundant array of disks (RAID). The huge resolution of my newer cameras has dramatically increased the file size of each photo.

The combination of professional shooting engagements and more adventure trips has increased the number of photos that I shoot. The size of my photo library has exploded in the past few years.

All have limitations and issues for the high-volume photographer looking to keep their photos backed up online. There are many useful and convenient online file storage options available, including Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Amazon Photos and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Dropbox business photo metadata