MOST of us have photos on our phones we would hate to lose but have not got around to saving anywhere.

Loom (loom.com) is a new site for storing and sharing photos online and is the website that wants to change all that.

Of course, you could easily be forgiven for thinking, “Wait, I thought we’d fixed photo sharing years ago”.

But it turns out, some people don’t agree. These days, most people chuck their digital photos on Facebook. Some use sites built for photo sharing, like Flickr (flickr.com) or 500px (500px.com).

But since smartphones took over our lives, too many of us have ended up with hundreds of photos stuck on our phones, doomed to remain there until they get deleted to make room for newer ones. It’s still far too complicated to get your photos out of your phone and into the rest of your life.

Loom is one of several companies trying to fix that. When you sign up for Loom, you get five gigabytes of storage space for free, enough for about 2,000 photos from a decent quality camera. If you need more space, you can pay for it.

What Loom offers is a foolproof, always-on backup of all your photos from all your devices and cameras. It has apps for mobile phones and desktop computers, and is designed to do as much as possible automatically. It will copy your existing photo library when you first set it up, and automatically upload all your new photos after that.

Once your photos are inside Loom, you can keep them organised in albums. Any photo or album can be shared with friends and loved ones via the web, and the people you’re sharing with don’t need to have a Loom account of their own.

Loom isn’t the only company thinking about this problem. All the big names, including Flickr, Facebook and Google, now have smartphone apps that do the automatic uploading thing too.

Even so, it still feels no one’s got it exactly right. Loom is certainly an interesting side-step on the path to getting online photo sharing properly fixed.