Google Photos has dropped its automatic syncing of your pictures to Google Drive. While the Photos app will continue to backup your photos, it will no longer save them in your network storage with Drive.
I don’t personally see this as an issue, but many will want an integrated app for both. Fortunately, with Android choice is king and there are some solid apps that offer this functionality. We’ve compiled a short list of some favorites that are available on Google Play.
We know there are more photo only apps that allow for this, but we chose to focus on apps that offer cloud storage and photos integrated into the same application.
Amazon Drive & Photos
Amazon Prime is a great service for all of us who spend online. It also offers pretty competent cloud storage included with that same subscription. With that, you get unlimited online storage for your photos for no extra charge.
You will have to sign up for an Amazon Drive plan and this starts at 100GB of storage for $11.99 per year. Maxed out at 1TB it’s just $59.99 annually. These caps are unaffected by the photos you upload. Overall, you get nice storage for your files and your photos in one service.
Prime members who are not already invested in as many Google apps should definitely give Amazon Drive a look in the Play Store. Check out the Amazon Photos app if you just want an alternative to Photos backup.
Box
Box app is one of the original online storage options. It keeps a good parity with competition in terms of both options and pricing. You can upload files, documents, and photos into your Box online vault.
With the Capture feature you can automatically have your photos backed up to your Box account. You can then edit, share, and access your favorite pics whenever and wherever you’d like.
The storage tiers come with one positive and one negative. There’s a free option that caps you at 10GB of data, but the downside is you can only upgrade up to a maximum of 100GB of storage at $10.
Box is an oldie-but-a-goodie in this space, the Android app is robust, and the service is available for desktops as well. Unfortunately, they do not offer a Linux version.
Mega
Mega was super popular a few years back in the Android community, but it seems to have lost its allure of late. Despite the fall in popularity, Mega is still a solid online storage option. However, it still has a great feature set and flexible pricing.
Two things really stand out with Mega: the number of tiers and end-to-end encryption. The tiers start at free with 50GB of data all the way up to 8TB for $33.76 per month. That’s an incredible amount of options when you consider 200GB thru 4TB tiers in between, all of which include photo backups.
Overall, Mega is a solid option. It offers multiple tiers for users to choose from and supports all the major desktop and mobile platforms.
Dropbox
Dropbox is another grand-daddy in the cloud storage family. The company has been around since 2008 and many still consider it the gold standard for file storage on the go. Dropbox has a strong history of both stability and consistent updates to its platform, making it a strong contender.
While the free tier is not great at just 2GB of storage, for $11.99 you can get a full 2TB with Dropbox’s Plus package. Or, take it further with the Professional plan at 3TB of data and real-time team tools such as shared docs and Dropbox Showcase.
From the free tier up, you get photo backups for all your pics. Just like Google Drive/Photos, your photos are almost instantly saved to your shared folder in Dropbox. The app offers a great alternative to Drive and Photos with a really well thought out application and platform support.
OneDrive
And then there’s Microsoft. The original tech giant has shifted towards software in recent years. The once king of computers lost its footing in mobile to Android and iOS so, to combat this, the company has started to offer top-tier apps instead. One such is its version of an online vault called OneDrive.
OneDrive is a strong offering in the online storage market as Microsoft comes with years of server experience to offer both performance and stability that people trust. All OneDrive plans offer photo backup for the likes of our comparison. Much like the rest, you toggle a setting and photos from your phone will automatically be backed up to your OneDrive.
OneDrive tiers start at free with 5GB of data while you can upgrade to 100GB for $1.99 per month. This gets you only storage, but if you really want to get crazy you can integrate with Office 365 and 1TB for $69.99 a year.
If you have a small office or want to expand to the whole family you can give 6 folks the same 1TB a piece for $99.99 a year. The app is well-reviewed on Google Play and is free to download.