Braden Kowitz
Some rights reserved

Have you ever lost the opportunity to take pictures because the memory on your cell phone was full? Or struggled to figure out where to store your photos so they’d be safe, even if your desktop computer at home died? Evidently these were problems big enough to get people making companies and building apps. And now they want you so badly they’re going to give you a lot. For free. Forever.

There are at least two big iOS photo apps that take the place of your standard camera app, but save all your photos to the cloud, for ever, for free. They are Shutter  & Trunx.

With Trunx the unlimited, free storage is only until September 30th. All photos uploaded until then will always be free. I’m not sure what additional ones will cost. I contacted them and they’re not sure either, but they assure me they’re going to make it very reasonable.

Trunx unifies photos from Instagram, Facebook & Dropbox, and has a desktop uploader. You can upload all the photos you want to store at no charge. It will automatically display all your photos from Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, your Photos and the photos Trunx takes together, and show them in a nice calendar format and allow tagging. It also allows you to make collaborative albums – so let’s say we have a 25th high school reunion, and everyone joins their 25th reunion albums to the collaborative album. We’d all see all the photos. That’s pretty fantastic.

You can share to all the social networks you’d want to from the app, too.

Shutter is considered by it’s creators as an entry point to their cloud storage service, which seems quite nice, too. The most expensive plan listed is $19/month for unlimited storage. I’m a big fan of not trusting computers at all for storage, so that sounds quite appealing.

With the Shutter app you have unlimited storage for all photos and video from your iPhone. For media uploaded from your computer you start at 5GB and can have up to 20GB for free.

Shutter lets you share to social networks, but you can also share privately with certain people. They’ll email you daily or weekly with photos taken that day throughout the years. Interesting. There are startups getting millions of funding to do only that.

You get to choose from several options how many photos you want stored on your phone, and all of them are also in the cloud.

One really interesting option is they say they can import from just about anything you have your photos in now, including iPhoto. I like the way you can organize photos in iPhoto, but I’m not a big fan of how it stores the photos, and would love to be able to manage them from a Mac but view them anywhere. It claims to even import tags. The web based viewer looks pretty nice, too.

I don’t think you’ll go wrong with either of these options, at least for now. Monitor them, see other options that come out, and always make sure you can get at your own content.