Photo storage in iCloud- so so confused!!

[Owlfright]

I have an iPhone and an iPad. The iPhone has run out of room to store photos. So I would love to store them somewhere safe, SI if u loose my phone I can still access my photos.

I've googled, photostream, camera roll and iCloud but I've got myself do very confused about how it all works. If I understand correctly iCloud doesn't store photos indefinitely?

I've looked at Dropbox but it looks like I have to upload every photo individually and I'm not sure I can do this from iCloud?!

I just want my photos somewhere safe- on disks, on a website or on my PC (eindows nit Mac), but I can't for the life of me see how to do it.

I feel like I'm trapped in an apple nightmare- please help!!!!

Okay.

iCloud is a somewhat limited way of synchronising stuff between selected devices (preferably - in Apple's mind - Apple devices but you can get stuff that will make it work with a Windows machine too). The stuff is backed up to a server somewhere on t'internet so that you can access it on a different machine but only on a machine that's running iTunes and is linked to your iTunes account.

Dropbox on the other hand is much less sophisticated than iCloud/iTunes but closer to what you actually want to do here. You store files on it - whether that's your photos, your work docs, whatever you like. You can access your Dropbox account from any machine just by logging on to the web interface, and on your regular machines you can install Dropbox so it will act like another drive or folder. You just copy stuff to it and it will synchronise it with your master drop box folder on the web.

On your iPhone/iPad, you can run the Dropbox app, and you can tell it to back all your photos up automagically, I will have a look at the setting in a mo as I have it turned off on my iPhone. It's also very easy to select multiple photos to store, albeit you do tick each one you want it to upload, but this is somewhat easier than alternatives like the Flickr app to the point where I use a bit of techno-geekery to upload photos to Dropbox and then have them automatically sent on to Flickr to avoid having to upload them one at a time through the Flickr interface.

I would vote for Dropbox - give it a try, you have nothing to lose. It's free to use, put a shout out on Facebook and one of your mates will be able to 'invite' you to the service, which will increase the amount of free file storage you - and they - have. If you don't like it, you can try iCloud (indeed you can try both at the same time if you want to!).

Agree with Dropbox. Their new camera upload feature sounds like exactly what you want.

I have it sync'ed with my android phone. Everytime I take a photo, it automatically uploads it to my dropbox account to a folder called "Camera Upload" when I connect to a wifi signal. It's not perfect because it also uploads crap photos I often don't want to keep. But every so often I just go through my Dropbox folder and have a purge.

Just checked my Dropbox app - there's a setting called 'Camera Upload'. If you switch that on, photos are automatically uploaded to a Camera Uploads folder.

Thank you for the really helpful suggestions. I'm going to sort this out as part of my New Year drive to get organised. I will report back.....