Photoshop, Shoebox, Lyve and Mylio solve your photo storage problems

Having trouble storing a lifetime of family snaps? Here are the best online solutions.

Generic photo of a family on holiday at the beach

Digital cameras, especially smartphones, entice us to snap, snap, snap with abandon. Yet all these moments we capture seem to ­vanish into a digital Bermuda ­Triangle, castaways adrift on old phones and disk drives.

Finally, these photos get a lifeline. It’s now possible to collect every shot you’ve ever taken and keep it within reach on your phone, tablet or computer. Apple this month replaced its 13-year-old iPhoto with a new editing application called Photos that collects all your pictures online in iCloud. With a few taps on your phone, you may rediscover a decade-old vacation sunset or outtakes from a family portrait.

But Apple’s Photos is only a part of the good news. I’ve tested four other applications with different ways to manage a lifetime of shots: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (which has just unveiled a speedier new version), Shoebox, Lyve and Mylio. Like Photos, they require subscriptions or hardware to keep running, strong Wi-Fi and some patience during setup — but the pay-off is worth it.

Online photo storage options including Flickr, Dropbox and Google are not so good at the ugly business of gathering up and getting all of your photos online.

The best of these new photo services not only find lost photos but also help you rediscover them through a timeline, facial identification and maps.

Just make it easy

Without doubt, Apple makes the simplest tool to store and edit your library. There’s just one catch: you have to commit to Apple.

A free replacement for the mercifully departed iPhoto that you get by updating OS X to its latest version (Yosemite 10.10.3), Photos zips through my test collection of 33,000 shots on a year-old iMac. I particularly like the smart tools for adjusting light and colour and other basic retouching.

Photos organises your library into a beautiful calendar of thumbnails that you browse like a time machine. It also can figure out where in the world the shots were taken or find them based on faces.

You can use Photos as a stand-alone editor just on a Mac or iPhone. But if you’ve got snaps scattered across many iDevices, turning on the iCloud photo ­library lets you archive them all centrally and keep edits in synch.

You get 5GB of free iCloud ­storage, but Apple charges between $1 and $20 a month for more. My 33,000-photo test required the $4 a month 200GB package.

The first time you upload your collection to iCloud, it will take a while — maybe weeks. How long depends on your internet provider, how busy Apple’s servers are and, possibly, the phase of the moon. At best, the upload rate was just under 3GB an hour, which is OK, but at other times and places it didn’t even clock a third of that. I wish Photos let you assign images star ratings, and that it would automatically import photos from other services, such as Facebook and Google Drive, like some ­competitors do.

Apple gets some little details right, like saving your data plan (and a bit of battery) by uploading from your phone only when it’s on a Wi-Fi connection. And even though you’ve got every photo with you on your phone and MacBook Air doesn’t mean it’s going to eat up all of your storage space. Photos can make sure it takes up space only for the photos you need and downloads the rest as you request them.

Photos is designed to hook ­people on to Apple. Importing shots from an Android or Windows phone requires plugging it into your computer. But using iCloud isn’t quite as limited as I’d feared: you can look at your ­Photos collection on non-Apple Web browsers. And if you decide to dump Apple, you can download your whole collection first.

I don’t want Apple

If you run Android or Windows, a solid alternative comes from a start-up called Shoebox. Its apps scour many different devices for photos to archive to its cloud. It will upload your phone’s camera roll, your old iPhoto collection or just a Windows or Mac folder you tell it to keep an eye on.

The Shoebox app is also good at helping you relive old photos by using features such as This Day in History, an addictive, ever-changing gallery. You can browse a timeline of photos or search by location and other tags.

Shoebox also has another advantage: it’s cheap. Uploading unlimited original files costs $5 a month. Storing low-res “screen quality” images is free.

Uploading speed was just as variable as it was with Photos, but Shoebox does cap image size at 20MB and won’t accept the big raw files pros like to use. Shoebox’s app for PCs and Macs doesn’t store any of your collection locally. Because of this, getting a closer look at a photo can sometimes take time. Shoebox’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t have built-in editing tools. You have use a different program, then load the edited photos back into Shoebox.

I want my own cloud

If you don’t like the idea of a monthly fee or don’t trust a company to archive your memories in the cloud, try Lyve. A free app for Apple, Android and Windows, Lyve keeps your collection in synch. Instead of uploading shots to the cloud, Lyve figures out where all your pictures are and puts thumbnail versions of them on every device. When you want the original, Lyve copies it from the device where it’s stored.

Setting up Lyve is fast because you’re not uploading to the cloud. It gets bonus points for also importing photos from Facebook, Dropbox and Google Drive.

But depending on a device somewhere else to hand over the full-size photo — or to even be online — can get complicated. This is where Lyve makes money: it sells drives that sit on your Wi-Fi network, always on, stuffed with all your photos. It charges $300 for 2TB. That drive even has a USB port and SD card slot on the back for easy uploading after a vacation.

Last week, Lyve unveiled Mix, a party mode that lets you instantly swap (and archive) photos with friends. But its apps still lack some editing and rediscovery aides that make Apple’s Photos so powerful.

If you want a lot more control over how all your shots are archived, a service called Mylio similarly makes a catalogue of all your photos across different devices (including PCs, Macs and iPhones), gives you some pro-level editing tools to tweak them, then keeps them in synch everywhere.

You can use Mylio to back up original files across several dev­ices, too. But the more devices you keep in synch, the more it costs — starting at $50 a year for three ­devices and 50,000 photos.

I need professional tools

For pro photographers — and weekend wannabes like me — Adobe’s Lightroom has long been a favourite. A year ago, Lightroom began to wade online. An update brings speed enhancements and powerful facial recognition.

Subscribers to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography Plan ($10 a month, including the latest Lightroom and Photoshop) can upload unlimited photos. These aren’t full-resolution files but when you edit them changes stay in synch everywhere without damaging your originals.

The caveat: Lightroom won’t put your original files in the cloud or even copy them to another dev­ice (except in a file backup). Its mobile apps can be slower than Apple’s Photos to load the low-res images. And its tools for organising photos based on location and facial recognition (both superior to Apple’s) are available only on the computer.

Still, Lightroom is the service I plan to stick with. My whole collection is giant — much larger than Apple’s 1TB limit for Photos. And I like to edit photos on a big screen, so the quality of the tools I get there are the most important.

But I sure wish Adobe would go all-in on a cloud service like Apple’s Photos. That’s “something that we will consider for a future release”, a spokeswoman says.