The cloud storage concept is already very much popular in terms of holding any kind of files, sharing them with anyone without any hustle. So in response to that, a growing number of companies are aiming to attract new customers by offering free cloud storage in Gigabyte count and certainly these are very useful for us too.
It doesn’t matter whether you are an individual user or running a business you’re going to love thses storage as long as you have to carefully manage your files on daily basis, so you are covered.
The reason!!!… simply nowadays you can’t give your files to your co-worker and tell him:
Don’t loose my files bro!
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In this list, I have mentioned the best free cloud storages which can keep your images or other files with high resolution, encrypted protection, including more advanced settings to control your files and images.
In terms of image, the advantage is that you can easily embed those images and serve them directly from these free unlimited cloud storages.
List Of Best Free Cloud Storage for Photos And files
These cloud storage are easy to use and provide free unlimited cloud storage up to 50GB.
#1. Cloudinary
Cloudinary is the most feature-rich free cloud storage specially designed for photos and video assets with a large ecosystem. As I said it works on image management as well as video apart from storing files and docs.
So if you are looking for storing and keep sharing your moments and videos from online cloud storage, cloudinary would be my first choice and so I suggest it to you. If you are a blogger or webmaster you can benefit from this amazing free cloud storage with CDN enabled faster content delivery.
In terms of WordPress site, it can directly send your images from the server to cloud with their secure API. You can also manually upload those images, videos and resize, optimize them when required.
Normally, there are some plugins to connect cloudinary with WordPress website but it’s really easy to manually manage and host your images from cloudinary with WordPress.
#2. Microsoft OneDrive
Microsoft OneDrive offers you 15gb cloud (free) storage for its users. This OneDrive cloud space comes with most Office software or subscriptions. The subscribed users can store any type of files in OneDrive but according to the official information, this storage is well suited to Office documents, particularly when it requires for real-time collaborations.
If you want to increase the functionality and storage you can buy the Office 365 Home with Premium OneDrive Features, which cost around $85.25 per year, or Office 365 Personal with Premium OneDrive Features for $59.79 per year.
Since office, word, excel and docs are some of the most important technology in terms of blogging and freelancing, utilizing their free storage is certainly a good choice for you.
#3. pCloud
pCloud is another cloud file storage which offers a reasonable 10GB free storage when you first sign up. There’s an option to upgrade your plan which can offer a large 500GB of storage for a one-time payment of $177.15.
I do not recommend other available subscription plans because you end up spending more on these plans.
For security purpose, pCloud offers some decent technology. Such as TLS/SSL channel protection, 256-bit AES encryption for all files with impressive backup and file recovery system.
pCloud is also a good option for sharing huge files with family and friends because there is no limit to the file size while sharing.
#4. Dropbox
Dropbox is one of the best free cloud storage which offers free basic account option with just 25 GB of free storage for 1 year. You can increase this limit up by referring your family members and friends to Dropbox.
Moreover, you can earn some extra storage by completing your user profile or following dropbox on Twitter.
If you make any changes to your files they will be backed up for 30 days. You can also decide to upload photos immediately to Dropbox after they’re taken (from mobile devices).
There is a dropbox plus subscription plan worth $7.29 per month that boosts the storage space to 1TB, or $18.36 a month for Professional for 2TBs of storage. For organizations, Dropbox Business plans offer even more capacity and features, with a starting price $11.07 per user per month.
#5. Google Drive
How can I exclude Google drive! 🙂 This is the most popular cloud drive app which provides 15GB of free online storage to anyone just with a Google account. It includes anything stored in Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.
Google Drive allows easy collaboration on files that are created in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. You can also create polls, surveys with Google Forms, Amazing diagrams with Google Drawings, scan important documents on your phone with Drive for Android and work on the files offline.
Like other storages I have mentioned above you can increase the capacity of google drive to 100GB for $1.76 a month, 1TB for $8.85 per month or to 10TB for $88.56 per month.
#6. Mega
Mega is a premium and very fast cloud storage platform that also offers a free plan which is of 50GB to be precise. Mega has a super simple drag and drops interface where you can upload photos and files.
You can upgrade your storage to 200 GB for $4.98 per month. Mega let you share your files with spacific links for each and transfer rate is much faster than most of other file storage.
File privacy is the primary concern of Mega as they claim that your files will be encrypted before it reaches the cloud, and even running with the tagline, ‘the privacy company‘.
#7. Amazon Drive
This list won’t be completed if in do not include Amazon drive as one of the free cloud storage that you can utilize.
Cloud computing giant Amazon offers 5GB of free storage with Amazon Drive. You can store any kind of files using their desktop client or mobile Drive app and using Amazon login.
The prime member can also invite up to five friends or family members to receive unlimited photo storage and collect photos together in the Family Vault. You can share your images with bigger screen devices like Amazon Fire TV and so on.
To upgrade your storage to 100 GB you need to pay $18.81 and $88.56 for 1 TB respectively. There is another massive plan for 30TB storage for $2656.95.
For WordPress users, there is another option to serve your images from Amazon S3. You can also move all the images from your WordPress account to the cloud with Amazon S3.
#8. Apple icloud
Apple’s iCloud is a great alternative for other free cloud storage which actually comes with any Apple ID account. It offers 5 GB storage for free to the users.
The accessibility is really easy. You can access the files from a browser by logging into your iCloud account or on any Apple device.
Increasing the storage capacity is optional which include plans such as to 50GB for $0.87 per month, to 200GB for $2.76 monthly, and to 2TB for $7.74 per month.
#9. MediaFire
MediaFire is a Texan company. If you are familiar with downloading tools and utilities you may have seen MediaFire. I have seen many websites using MediaFire to distribute files and allow users to download the files.
Indeed it’s a great way to share files with security + you can use it as personal file storage too. It can be used through a web or mobile app easily.
MediaFire offers standard 10GB of free storage and file size up to 4GB for the ad-supported version or up to 50GB with ‘bonuses’.
You can upgrade your storage to 1TB with a Pro plan, which costs around $3.75 per month, or a business plan up to 100TB of space for just $40 a month.
#10. Box
Box is another free cloud storage which provides a 10 GB free storage upon signing up but there is a limitation that you can only upload maximum 250MB each file.
Sharing your file is very easy directly from the box via email link. Moreover, you can collaborate your files with office 365 or Box note.
The Personal Pro plan increases the storage limit to 100GB and files upload limit to 5GB, for the price of $8.86 per month. Box is also available in three business plans, with prices starting at $4 per user per month.
#11. Sync
Sync is also one of the best free cloud storage which provides easy access, store and shares files with the end to end encryption securely. You can also send files to anyone who doesn’t have even an account on Sync.
The other features are the same such as file request, password, protection and, permission, etc. More than one users can work on the same file. It is available for 30 days free trial before moving to the premium plans.
This app is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, Androids, and Web as well. hence, you can access your file from any device.
To use your images with WordPress you can create an image link there and send/link it to the WordPress media gallery. Use this guide to know the procedure.
However, on Sync you don’t have to pay for Zero-knowledge encryption like Pcloud. For those who always look for high security on images, they can go for Sync.com.
But there is a disadvantage of Sync that you cannot preview the images through browsers. Moreover, it has the automatic backup and restores which ensures to recover deleted files.
#12. Google Photos
Well, almost all of you have used Google photos for storing your images. It gives unlimited image cloud storage for free and you can access them from any devices.
If your mobile device is correctly configured with Google photos then all the images will be stored there as well as the videos automatically.
However, if we talk about privacy then Google photos will keep your images private until you share with others. You can even see the images offline.
One amazing feature of Google Photos is that it can recognize the objects in your image. Whenever you type any keyword that matches your files or images, it will show those images on the top.
It automatically organizes your images according to date so that later you can search for any date you want. Well, there are no other features such as zero-knowledge encryption and client-side encryption like PCloud and Sync.com have.
Like other web-based image servers, you can serve images from Google Drive to your website. If you have a WordPress site you can use the Google Photos Gallery with Shortcodes plugin to fetch and put the images on the website.
So just by using the shortcodes, you can embed the images on site.
#13. Egnyte Connect
It may be possible that individual users do not prefer this online free cloud storage because they don’t give personal plans.
The main advantage is that Egnyte Connect gives higher serving speed because it uses Block-level file copying method in which only the changed/modified part of files are synced. Egnyte connect takes 9 minutes to upload 250 MB.
Their plans require a minimum of 5 users if you want to buy a Business plan or Team plans. As it has effective features for working on photos, you can easily preview and sort the photos from your gallery.
It also uses Smartvid.io machine algorithms for recognition features similar to Google photos. However, it has a desktop client called Egnyte Drive which can be used without storing the cloud content.
From Egnyte connect you can open the photos in Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and also in Adobe In-design.
So far if you have a business website related to the image or your business faster serving of images then Egnyte Connect is one of the best options for you. Visit their website and ask for a free trial before getting into the premium plans.
#14. 500px
If you are a photo enthusiast or want to make your photography best then 500px is the best option for you. As the service uses algorithm so that views, like, comments are allowed and if you get more plus then your page will get one of the popular pages.
This makes the application more engaging. 500px is one of the best cloud storage that gives direct communication between photographers and clients by putting marketplace feature.
You can also add watermark and license to your photos. You can also preview your photos in various categories such as portrait, landscape, etc. The encryption password can be used for security propose also.
To use 500px with WordPress you can use these three plugins. All of them are great, so choose one of them considering your requirements. Here are the WordPress plugins Media Manager Plus, 500px Widget, WP 500px, jsGallery.
#15. Flickr
Flickr is another popular free cloud storage for images which offers free plans to the user. It also offers monthly plans of $5.99 and annual will be of $49.99 with amazing features added to it.
However, in the free plan, there is a limit of 1000 photos and video storage. Whereas, the Pro plan gives the multiple advanced features such as advertising-free browsing, advanced statics etc.
You can easily upload the photo by clicking on the upload icon and then you can also make a tag on the photo. As like 500px, Flickr is also not accepting RAW files. You can also use Flickr in Android and iOS.
You can easily share your entire photo stream folder. You can also generate a link and share them via Email. There are lots of plugins available to use flicker photos with WordPress. Install anyone you like the most.
These are 15 free cloud storage that you can utilize to store your media files and other files as well. You can share, you can store, you can protect them as well. Once I find more storage which offers a free plan I will introduce them to this list. Till then enjoy these awesome cloud storage and keep your files safe in the cloud.
Cheers…