It was the moment every camera-carrying traveler fears: A few years ago, photo and travel enthusiast Bengt Beier was midway through a trip to Poland when he accidentally dropped his camera. It hit the ground hard but looked okay so he boarded his bus to the next destination. A half hour passed before he realized the SD card had popped out — and with it, every photo he’d taken in the first two weeks of the trip was gone forever. “It was a lesson learned,” he later wrote on his blog. “Now, one of the first things I tell people who ask how to get started in travel photography is this: Back up your photos while traveling!”

After the Poland incident, Beier went looking for ways to secure his travel photos and soon discovered Mylio. Among travel photographers, he’s far from alone. Here’s why Mylio is the perfect companion for any travel photographer at any skill level.

Automatic syncing

When you’re traveling, there’s so much to see and so many distractions that having an app that automatically backs up your photos makes for a must-have feature. Mylio does exactly that, syncing the photos in your collection to all of your enabled devices. Beier, for instance, enabled Mylio on his PC, both of his tablets (that run Windows) as well as his phone (Android). “The sync function,” he says, “is truly magical. I just switch on my devices, and wait for it to send the full resolution pics or previews to all my devices. It even automatically creates a backup on my NAS at the same time.” That’s protection, and that’s what makes Mylio the best travel app to back-up your travel photos.

Edit and organize from anywhere

One of the things travel photographers love most about Mylio is that it doesn’t require an Internet connection. Or WiFi. Or the cloud. That means you can edit your work from the top of a mountain, on a lonely beach, or any place totally off the grid. Mylio saves your edits and filing moves, and as soon as you’re back in range, it automatically saves and syncs your originals to all of your devices.

This capability also lets you take advantage of all those random pockets of downtime you have while traveling: If you’re on a plane or waiting in a long line, with Mylio, you can be editing, tagging, captioning, or organizing on whatever device you have handy.

Flexible storage  

A sunset. A church. A marketplace filled with exotic, colorful food. When you’re traveling, it’s easy to snap-snap-snap your smartphone right out of storage. The last thing you want to have to do is worry about running out of space or be forced to trash old photos to make room for the new. Using Mylio means you’ll never have to do that. By choosing whether you want a particular device to store full-resolution or optimized (that is, smaller) versions of your images, you can save a ton of room on your phone or tablet while keeping the original files backed up elsewhere. For how-to details, see the guide for Sync Policy Settings.

Instant photo sharing

With Mylio, photos you take are instantly shared with any of your enabled device anywhere. That means that if you’re on assignment in Peru, your pictures can be automatically seen by the folks in the home office in Philadelphia. Not only does that save time, but it saves you the trouble of emailing or uploading files via Dropbox or WeTransfer. Likewise, if you’re far from home but still need to be able to access your library, Mylio’s got you covered. This also makes Mylio the best app for sharing travel photos with your family; if you decide to share, everyone using an enabled device will be able see each other’s photos so you can compare visual notes.

The best app for travel photography

For Beier, Mylio not only became his go-to back-up solution while traveling, he also discovered it helps him at every stage of his photo management workflow. “Think of it like a basic Lightroom but with a proper sync function that syncs all my photos to all my devices,” he wrote on his blog. “And I get the same set of editing tools on my PC, my tablets, and my phone.” (To read a detailed description of his workflow, check out the full blog post here.) Like Beier, many travel photographers have come to see Mylio as a perfect companion — an insurance policy and a time-saver, yes, but also a way to get a bit more peace of mind while on the road.