Spring cleaning in today’s world should be about more than just washing windows and vacuuming under furniture. If that’s where you’re stopping, it’s just a surface clean.
Your virtual life–your photos, important files, social media–are all cluttered too. Do you take the time to organize and clean up your virtual life?
Part 2 in this series of Spring Cleaning Tips for Your Virtual Life focuses on cloud photo storage.
Cloud Photo Storage
Raise your hand if you can say all of your photos are completely organized and backed up in multiple locations. I couldn’t either until I discovered a particular cloud photo storage service.
ThisLife
Overview
ThisLife by Shutterfly is the service I use. Shutterfly already takes care of all of our pictures–arranging them into nice photo books and sending prints and printing cards–so this is a very natural partnership. ThisLife also treats your account much more like a massive online photo album than just plain storage. Photos are categorized automatically by date and place (if uploaded from Facebook) with further options for tagging that I have to admit, I haven’t really taken advantage of! The layout is visually appealing and easy to navigate on a desktop or via the ThisLife app.
Getting Started
Getting started was super easy. I first installed the app on my phone and all of my camera role pictures (and video) were automatically uploaded. From my computer, I installed their desktop installer. This was an easy process to back up all the pictures stored on my computer’s hard drive.
Pricing
New Pricing as of 2015!
ThisLife no longer charges for photos at all! Photos are free and unlimited, and there are only paid plans for video.
60GB (or about 1,000 videos) for $19.99/year
300GB (or about 5,000 videos) for $49.99/year
Unlimited videos for $139.99
I am extremely happy with ThisLife. Their customer service was also fantastic. When I first signed up, photo storage was a paid plan–59.99 for the year! I was ok with that price tag to have peace of mind. Actually when researching for this post, I was surprised to see the new plan. Customer service credited my Shutterfly account to reflect the new plan price (I only need 60GB of video storage right now).
Other Photo Cloud Storage Options
As you can see, I’m very happy with ThisLife and don’t plan on going anywhere, but there are definitely other great options for photo cloud storage to explore.
Every once in a while, Amazon Prime sends me an email to remind me that I’m basically not using any of the benefits I receive with my Prime membership besides free 2 day shipping. One benefit they informed me of was free photo cloud storage. So I downloaded the app on my phone and all my phone photos are backed up–just like that!
The app is clean, organized and easy to view photos sorted by date. Easy to add photos from my phone’s camera roll and other folders, but I have yet to explore the desktop version yet–I would assume it to be similar. I also see an option for documents. For me, it’s free and you can’t beat that. Seems definitely worth it if you’re a prime member. I think I will still stay with ThisLife since I do use Shutterfly for all of my printing projects.
Dropbox is also a popular cloud backup service, and I word it that way because they also known for their document backup and sharing. Dropbox has a free plan for 2GB of space and 9.99/month for 1000GB.
Additional Photo Backup
I have completely stopped storing photos on my computer’s hard drive since it is all out of memory. So I have all of my photos stored on a flash drive that I update regularly, and really, most of my pictures are taken with my phone making it very easy to update ThisLife on a regular basis.
Are your photos backed up on a cloud storage service? Which ones do you have experience with? Share in the comments below!
You might like:
Part 1- Spring Cleaning Tips for Your Lifestyle
Stay tuned this week for Part 3!
