The holiday blues is still here. The tan is fresh and so are the memories of the incredible moments shared with the loved ones. Away from the daily routine, with the feet dipped in water, sipping on a tropical cocktail, talking about abstract things and watching the mesmerizing sunset. The light is perfect for a group shot. Let’s remember this moment forever! #nofilter #holidayblues #takemeback

So many beautiful pictures charged with countless stories, but how do you quickly share them with your friends and family?

To the unlearned, tapping a photo in your gallery and then sharing it over WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger seems to do the job. And while it’s quick and intuitive, it does come at the cost of degraded quality. Here are some tools to send your latest pictures on the fly without compromising on the pixels.

● Flickr is always a great place to store and share your photos from. Users get a single terabyte of storage space with the free version along with a plethora of different tools for sorting and editing your photos. However, the best part is the ability to download photos that have been shared at different resolutions, including the original size.

● PhotoBucket is another great website to use, though you won’t get as much storage when you’re using a free account. Users will be relegated to 2GB, which is still enough for a quite a few hundred or thousand (depending on the size) images. Users get a smattering of editing tools to enhance their images and, when they’re ready, they can share their albums or individual photos though a variety of channels.

● 500 Pixels is a site for the more serious photographer. Far more minimalistic than the previous two sites, you can store photos in either Sets or Stories. The former is photos revolving around a particular theme whilst the latter is focused on photos of an event. The free version of the service allows you to upload 20 photos a week and store up to 2,000 photos.

● Now, we can’t forget Dropbox or any other file storage website or app, such as Google Drive. The latter has a limit of 15GB of storage per Gmail account, but there aren’t any specific photo editing tools that come with the service. Neither is there a custom way of sharing different resolutions of your photos. However, what you do get is the ability to upload all your files in their original size, without any loss in quality. Dropbox is more or less the same, lacking when it comes to photo editing but fantastic in terms of quality retention. Furthermore, you can easily share your photos with both services by linking back to their respective Google Drive or Dropbox links.

● Lastly, users have both Google Photos and Apple’s iCloud Photo Library. While the latter is an extension of Apple’s iCloud storage service, I’ll be treating it as a separate entity due to its added capabilities. The iCloud Photo Library gives users 5GB of free storage space with iCloud, letting you upload thousands of photos for easy sharing and organizing.
While sharing is both easy on Google Photos and Apple’s iCloud Photo Library, it’s the organizational features that have me salivating.

On iCloud, you can have your photos organized into Moments, Collections, and Years across all your devices — and even on the web. You can mark favorites, create albums, or drag photos into a custom order. And now Photos can turn them into unforgettable experiences called Memories, displaying the best images in your collections in stunning slideshows.

Meanwhile, on Google Photos, you can expect to upload your photos to the service and come back in the morning to find neatly organized albums categorizing nearly image. You’ll have separate albums for selfies, panoramas, pictures of food, and so forth. You can even have them grouped depending on who’s in the picture.

Google Photos is a personal favorite of mine when it comes to sharing photos, due to the last feature.

Ever go to a party and then have people request their pictures from you? Rather than going through all the pictures, you can just have Google Photos do it for you with no effort on your part.

Are you using any other services, websites or apps to share photos? Let us know!

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