Inventive new ways to back up your travel pix on the fly

Travellers who use digital cameras have long relied on flash memory cards to protect their precious memories until they return home and stash them on their computers. But Web-based storage services are increasingly becoming an attractive option for uploading images on the fly, too.

Great image of a man in St Petersburg for the Russian Orthodox Epiphany Image by (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

Here are some of the updated options for online image storage:

In August 2014, Dropbox tripled the amount of storage it offered. It now charges $9.99 a month (or $99 a year) for 1 terabyte of space, with 2 gigabytes available for free.

The move is similar to a recent one from Google, which in March 2014 began charging $9.99 a month, or $99 a year, for 1 terabyte of storage, on its Drive platform. The first 15 gigabytes are free.

The Taj Mahal. Image by LASZLO ILYES / CC BY 2.0

In autumn 2014, Apple debuted a photo storage function on its iCloud Drive storage platform. The first 5 gigabytes are available for free, while using up to 1 terabyte of storage costs $19.99 a month.

A seal photobombing via drone in South Georgia. Image by Courtesy of www.airpano.com

In late March 2015, Amazon introduced unlimited photo storage for a fee of $11.99 (US) a year on its Cloud Drive storage service. Previously a user could only store 5 gigabytes for free.

Microsoft has also been touting the appeal of using its OneDrive cloud-based storage service for keeping photos. It charges $6.99 a month, or $84 a year, for 1 terabyte, though the first 15 gigabytes are free.

The least expensive offer is from Yahoo’s Flickr, a service that charges nothing for 1 terabyte of photo or video storage, with a $49.99 a year fee for users who prefer advertisements to be removed from the pages displaying their photos.

(For reference, a gigabyte can store about 150 average-size digital photos, while a terabyte of photos could store about a half million ordinary-sized digital photos.)