For a few dollars a month and a few hours of upload time, you get features unavailable on most free desktop photo-editing software - and the peace of mind that comes with a cloud backup. Huge RAW image sizes, duplicate photos, 1080p videos, and years of library database bloat were all good reasons to just leave the photos sitting on your hard drive - and pray the drive didn’t stop working before you backed it all up.īut as the price of storage has fallen, and broadband access has become more pervasive, more and more companies are competing to make the cloud the default place to store your memories. Just as services like Apple’s Photo Stream have popularized the power of cloud storage, they have also revealed its limitations.

The internet was always supposed to give us a hassle-free way to store and manage our stuff - but in practice, even storing photos and videos has remained a massive headache.