You don’t want to pay for Google Photos storage

Google left many users disappointed when it announced plans to end free Google Photos storage. As of June 1, 2021, you’ll need to pay for a Google One subscription if your photos exceed your free 15 GB Google Drive space. Fortunately, there are already plenty of alternatives to Google Photos. It’s just a matter of whether you want to get off the ship or not.

With that in mind, we asked you, our readers, if you’re willing to pay to store your media on Google Photos. Here’s how you voted in our poll.

Are you going to pay to store your media in Google Photos?

Results

Understandably, many of our readers haven’t been willing to pay for free Google service for the past five years. Out of a total of 2,115 votes, 48.2% of our survey respondents will switch to other free alternatives to Google Photos.

Meanwhile, 19% of respondents are willing to shell out extra for a Google One subscription. 25% are still not sure what to do and see how things turn out.

A tiny fraction (7.6%) of our readers polled voted to say they would pay for a different media storage service.

Your comments

• cfischer69: I was looking for the option “hell no”. To all those who will be building on the new promise that your existing photos will be acquired: how long before this promise is broken? If I’m going to pay to store my photos, it won’t be Google.
• The One: So I’m paying x dollars for y amount of cloud storage, and in a year or two or three, Google is increasing the price arbitrarily. It leaves me having to pay more money to have Google host my content, and it keeps repeating until I die? I don’t see the benefit.
• Austin Eschweiler: This might also be a good time to start using my Plex server as photo storage.
• rap: If I do local storage, I have to pay to back up my local storage. I want my stuff somewhere in the cloud. I’m returning to Prime as well, but I’m not sure how much is included and might miss it too. I’ll probably pay when I run out of space. Google has a tool for estimating when you’ll run out and mine says one year. However, a lot can happen during this time.
• Jarrod: I have a family sharing plan and three out of five of us have a pixel, so that won’t really affect us anyway. Soon four out of five of us will have a Pixel (my wife just won’t give up on the iPhone). But, to be absolutely sure, I’ve been paying for the 200GB plan for months. Even long before all that. This is mainly because I like to store my photos in full resolution. Unfortunately, in the future I will probably have to use the free high definition version.
• Nikolas Spiridakis: I happen that there are many storage alternatives out there, but where can you find a service with AI that is this good? I mean, if you’ve ever used gphotos, you know it categorizes things, identifies faces, you can search for photos by describing them, etc. These things are hard to find …