Backing up your photos isn’t just smart; it can be social, too

Your digital photos may be the most meaningful zeroes and ones you own -- after all, you can’t get back the moments they capture. The good news is you can keep those memories safe without keeping them hidden on a hard drive. But first, make sure they’re backed up to that hard drive by including your iPhoto Library (Home > Pictures) in your backup routine. We don’t want you losing a single shot of your Chihuahua in her Halloween costume.

With iOS 5’s Photo Stream, if it’s in iPhoto, it’s probably available on your iOS device.

But those shots don’t have to stay in one place, thanks to Photo Stream, a free part of iCloud. It’s photo syncing, Apple style, across your computers and iOS devices. As you take pictures on, say, your iPhone, or import them to your iPhoto Library, the shots are synced over Wi-Fi to all your devices, accessible in a special Photo Stream album. That album holds your latest 1,000 pictures, with the newest photos saved for 30 days. That’s plenty of time to save your favorites to your devices’ photo libraries, but don’t worry -- new pictures are automatically saved to your iPhoto Library for backup. Although Photo Stream leaves the actual backing up to you, it’s included with all levels of iCloud storage and doesn’t count against your storage limit.

For a more social experience, Adobe Carousel ($5.99 a month, $59.99 a year, adobe.com), for Mac and iOS, lets you sync, share, and even edit your pictures across multiple devices. First you’ll have to import your pictures into Carousel on your Mac. The full-size files are then synced to your other devices, but scaled down to twice the resolution of the device’s display to save space. Images taken or imported on any of your devices are automatically pushed to the rest over Wi-Fi and 3G. Photos to be edited on-the-go are downloaded to your device at full resolution so you can apply filters, adjust color and white balance, and more. These nondestructive changes, and the settings of controls you use to make them, are synced along with the tweaked image file. Even better, you can share your photo library with up to five friends, all of whom have the same powers to edit pictures as you do. And to keep things friendly, everyone can protect their favorite shots from unwanted edits by marking them as favorites.

Dropbox’s awesome Photo Gallery feature turns this…

…into this with just a few clicks.

If you’re a shutterbug and Dropbox user, Dropbox photo galleries make it as easy as drag-and-drop to sync and share your pictures. Just create a subfolder in ~/Dropbox/Photos, then paste or drag image files into it. Right-click the folder and choose Dropbox > Copy Public Gallery Link. Paste the address into a browser’s address field to view the gallery, or into an email client to share the link with friends. They’ll be able to browse the folder’s pictures, view them full size, and even download their favorites. For an even more social experience -- and isn’t that what swapping photos is about? -- you can share your gallery folders directly with other Dropbox users. Just create a photo folder, fill it with pictures from an event, then Control-click it and select Dropbox > Share This Folder. You’ll be sent to the Dropbox site where you can invite friends to sync the gallery folder to their computer. Then they can add their own pictures from the event, which will sync back to your Dropbox folder for backup.