This whataboutism we are hearing now about "the energy needed to store your pictures" is just corporate whataboutism, trying to push blame onto consumers.
Let's say you have 2 TB of photos stored. If that's consuming more than 2 watts of electricity on average, the cloud providers have to be quite incompetent (they are mostly not).
2 watts is 1 kWh in 20 days, so 18 kWh in one year. The emissions from 18 kWh in the US is around 6 kg of CO2. This is the equivalent of driving a car for about 20 minutes on the highway, one time per year. Or spending 5 minutes longer in the shower 4 times per year.
Let's say you have 2 TB of photos stored. If that's consuming more than 2 watts of electricity on average, the cloud providers have to be quite incompetent (they are mostly not).
2 watts is 1 kWh in 20 days, so 18 kWh in one year. The emissions from 18 kWh in the US is around 6 kg of CO2. This is the equivalent of driving a car for about 20 minutes on the highway, one time per year. Or spending 5 minutes longer in the shower 4 times per year.