Thought about making a 2nd gmail email account and uploading all of my content to google photos to share with others, but curious to know what everyone else is using. thanks!

I use a 3TB SSD drive for local storage.  When sharing videos I use YouTube or Instagram for photos.  

Hi, there. Thank you for sharing your query with us. You may consider saving files online such as Google Drive or save them locally via an external hard drive. We hope you get the best recommendation that you may need.

iCloud mainly,  you can share entire albums etc with people.  

I often use cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive etc. But what works best depends on your needs. I do think Google Photos could be a valid option for many use cases.

I use my home built TrueNAS appliance for my backup and photo storage.

Seconding the homebrew TrueNAS Core deployment above but to utilize the Google Drive Cloud sync for uploads. I also use Google Photos for affordable cloud storage but it's all a pain if you have a slow upload speed. I'd also recommend checking out BackBlaze. It's currently $6 per TB/month and scales up pretty well depending on how much media you're dealing with.

I have onedrive.

I used to use Google Photos until I read that Google can use your photos to train their AI engine. As a matter of fact there are articles out there in the past 2 or so years that your public photos can be used to train AI for image generation (Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc the usual suspects). So I deleted all my photos from Google and I just send them via email if I want to share. Some artists and photographers got pi-ss-ed because their work is copyrighted and these compaines didn’t ask for permission. Nothing new there.

Zuckerberg’s going to use your instagram photos to train his AI machines
https://petapixel.com/2024/02/02 ... in-his-ai-machines/

Is Adobe using your photos to train their AI?
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/0 ... ai-its-complicated/

You can now check if your photos were used to train AI image generators
https://petapixel.com/2022/09/19 ... i-image-generators/

…and so forth