My current photo storage setup (2020)

I'm not much of a photographer. At all. But I do take photos from time to time and combined with the much better and much more frequently taken photos of my partner, there are memories to be preserved.

This is my current photo storage setup, short and sweet:

Google Photos

You can share your library with a significant other so that not only they see your photos, but you also have the option to save all photos from their library in your account as well. Combined with the "high quality" storage option you can make sure that no picture that has ever found it's way to Google Photos from either of you will get lost. It's a cost effective way (free) to have a cloud back up for all of your photos that doesn't clog up your hard drive. With, e. g. Backblaze you would have to keep the photos on your local machine or at least a connected drive.

Google Photos also makes it easy to share and search for pictures, which can come in handy from time to time.

Apple Photos + iCloud Drive

Whereas Google Photos only has a scaled down version, which is still enough for most purposes, my Apple Photos library has the originals and is generally more of a curated experience. If I would like to show photos from our recent trip to Kurouma, then I would show the album in Apple Photos, for example. This is the cloud storage I pay money for.

I use two different cloud services to make sure there are at least two different copies of my photos, so that if iCloud for whatever reason would eat my files, I still would have all of them in Google Photos. As an added bonus, I also have an additional copy of my partners photos, which is nice, too.

No local storage, yet

One of the big purchases on my list this year is a Synology storage solution, which will not only hold my pictures, but all the other things, too.

Right now, I do not have a local storage solution of my pictures but when the diskstation is purchased and with the photo station iOS app on our phones, all photos will be reduntantly available from Google Photos, Apple Photos and the NAS.