If you want to ship high quality original photos to your friends and family, then in that location's really but 1 adept way to exercise it: with a cloud storage provider. Social networks like Facebook and Instagram don't store the original files; they reduce the quality, so pages load faster. Fifty-fifty good, defended photo services like 500px exercise it.

This isn't an effect if you're just posting photos so people tin view them on their smartphones or computers, but if you want them to be able to print the images, you lot need to requite them high-quality files.

RELATED: Why Practise Photos Look Dissimilar When I Print Them?

What Counts as "Loftier-Quality" Files?

The photos your smartphone camera—or whatsoever proper camera—tin accept are far bigger and of college quality than social media sites tin can handle. If every image on your Instagram feed were 2 MBs and 12 megapixels, you'd burn down through your information cap in no fourth dimension. The thing is, these, loftier-resolution, ii MB files are exactly what you want if you're going to print them, prepare them equally your desktop background, or do anything except view them in the correct size box on social media.

Here'due south a photo of mine I uploaded to Facebook—information technology was 2.vii MB and 5166×3444 pixels. When I downloaded it from my Timeline, information technology was 74 KB and 860×640 pixels. You could barely print that on a postage stamp stamp!

In general, when we talk about high-quality files, what we mean are the original photos straight from your phone or camera or, if y'all've made any edits, a saved copy in total resolution. If you shoot RAW, you tin can send exported full-resolution JPEGs; full-size RAW files can be a chip unwieldy, specially if the other person doesn't take the apps to deal with them. These are the kind of files from which they'll be able to print nice prints.

RELATED: How Big of a Photograph Can I Print from My Phone or Camera?

Don't just download the photos yous want to share with people from your Facebook folio. Go them from your reckoner or smartphone.

Deject Sharing: The All-time, Simplest, and Cheapest Solution

A few years ago, deject storage was a competitive market place. Now it's a commodity: at that place are heaps of services willing to offer you gigabytes of free storage space. The three we more often than not recommend are Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive.

Which of the three yous use doesn't affair. They're all pretty similar, and they all accept desktop and mobile apps.

  • Dropbox has the worst free tier at 2 GB. Unless yous already use Dropbox, it's probably not the 1 to go with.
  • You probably already have Google Drive; yous go 15GB of free storage with a Gmail account. If y'all're non sure which to use, information technology'due south a prophylactic option.
  • If you use a PC, you also accept Microsoft OneDrive. Like Google Drive, you become 5 GB for free. The best thing about information technology is that for $100/twelvemonth (the same cost Dropbox and Google charge for 1 TB of storage) Function 365 gives yous i TB of storage each for half-dozen Microsoft accounts and access to Microsoft Function. If you lot're going to pay, it's the all-time option.

Put all the high-quality files you want to send in a single folder in your cloud storage app of option and let information technology upload. Unless yous're sharing thousands of DSLR photos, you won't come anywhere shut to hitting the limits of your free storage. Right click on the folder and choose the relevant share option. Bank check out our total guide to sharing files and folders with cloud storage apps for more.

RELATED: How to Share Files and Folders From Your Cloud Storage Folder

Share the link and at present anyone who has it volition be able to get in and download the high quality images.

No more going around to your friends' house and seeing a very blurry version of a photo you took on their refrigerator.

A Note for Professionals

If you're a professional photographer looking to share photos with clients, the cloud storage method above will work but can be a bit awkward to manage. Instead, yous should check out defended online client galleries and proofing services like PhotoProofPro and PixieSet. The extra features they offer, even so, are far beyond the needs of regular people.