Best Cloud Storage for Photographers

A RAW archive is the one library that never stops growing and never gets smaller. Every card you offload is another 40 to 90 GB of frames you will not delete, and the moment the total crosses 200 GB, the big providers stop selling you storage and start selling you a 2 TB plan. You pay for a terabyte and a half of empty space because nobody wanted to price the middle.

StorageBites prices the middle. 500 GB is $3 a month, and the ladder moves in $1 steps from 100 GB to 1 TB, so the plan you buy is the size of the archive you actually have. When it grows, you move up a dollar; when you finally cull a season, you move back down.

Every file is encrypted in your browser before it leaves your machine. The app generates a per-file AES-GCM key on your device and encrypts the frame with it, so the bytes that travel and the bytes the storage layer holds are ciphertext. We manage those keys under a managed key management service, which is what lets you open the same archive on the studio machine and the laptop, and what makes thumbnails and video playback work at all. The honest flip side: that key access means we can decrypt your files and would comply with a valid legal request. This is encryption, not zero-knowledge encryption, and we would rather say so here than in a footnote.

• Per-file AES-GCM encryption in the browser, on every upload, on every plan.
• Stored redundantly on a major third-party object-storage provider.
• Read-only share links for clients, with an expiry date, revocable any time.
• Your files are never used to train AI models, ours or anyone else's.

An archive is not a working drive. It is the set of frames you have already decided to keep — delivered jobs, the portfolio selects, the negatives of your business — and its job is to still be there in ten years, not to be fast. What it needs is durability, a price that does not punish you for the fact that it only ever grows, and the ability to get everything back out unchanged.

Rounding up is what the mainstream plans do instead. A 260 GB archive is charged like a 2 TB one. Here it is 500 GB · $3/mo, and when it was still 240 GB it was 250 GB · $2/mo. Upgrades take effect immediately and the difference is prorated onto your next bill; downgrades work the same way in reverse, as long as what you are storing fits inside the smaller tier. Your renewal date never moves.

Files stay files. There is no proprietary container and no re-encoding on the way in or out: a CR3, an ARW, a NEF or a DNG comes back byte-for-byte identical to the one you uploaded, and you can download the whole archive whenever you want, including on your way out the door.

Per gigabyte, the drive wins and it is not close: a 4 TB external is a one-off purchase and a cloud plan is a monthly one. That comparison just measures the wrong thing. A single drive is one copy. It is one drop, one power surge, one failed controller, one burglary or one flooded studio away from being neither cheap nor storage — and drives do not warn you first.

The rule most working photographers settle on is three copies, on two kinds of media, with one of them somewhere else. The drive on the desk is fast local working storage and the second drive is the copy that fails at the same time as the first if they share a room. The off-site copy is the one that survives the event that takes the studio out, and renting a slice of redundant object storage is the cheapest way to have one without driving a disk to a relative's house every month.

Practically: keep the current jobs on the drive where the speed matters, and put the delivered and portfolio frames in the cloud, which at 500 GB · $3/mo costs less per month than a single roll of gaffer tape. The drive keeps its job. It just stops being the only copy.

Almost every photographer is now also shooting some video, and video is what decides your tier. Mirrorless 4K at 100 to 200 Mbps runs roughly 45 to 90 GB an hour, and phone 4K roughly 10 to 25 GB an hour. One full day of multicam can outweigh a whole year of stills, so size your plan from your video hours first and treat the frames as the rounding error they have become.

Video and audio play straight from encrypted storage in the browser. The file is decrypted as it streams, so you can scrub through a take to check it, or send a client a read-only link they can watch, without either of you downloading a 40 GB master first. The same goes for a gallery of RAW frames: thumbnails render without pulling the originals down.

One honest limit: if you are archiving every camera original from regular video work, you will pass 1 TB quickly, and our largest plan is 1 TB at $5 a month. At that point the sensible split is local storage for the masters and a plan here for the selects, the delivered cuts and the stills.