Updated 2021. Google announced it will stop offering free unlimited storage for high-quality photos on June 1, 2021. All photos uploaded before that date will not be counted towards your storage limit. Photos uploaded after that date will count towards your Google Drive limit (15 GB standard). If the account is inactive or exceeds the 15 GB limit for two years, Google may delete your photos.
Original (outdated!) post:
Google may already see all your search queries, have access to all your e-mails with Gmail, and now it wants to store all your photos. Why would you let them? How about unlimited space. Free. From the Google Blog:
Google Photos gives you a single, private place to keep a lifetime of memories, and access them from any device. They’re automatically backed up and synced, so you can have peace of mind that your photos are safe, available across all your devices.
Google Photos will store unlimited images for free, with a few conditions. You can choose from one of two options:
- High quality – Unlimited free storage. Recommended for phones or point-and-shoot cameras that are 16 megapixels (MP) or less. Good for typical printing and sharing. Will be compressed using their special algorithm. Anything under 16 megapixels will have minimal degradation of quality, supposedly it is optimized so that visually you can’t tell the difference. Anything bigger than 16 megapixels will be downsized to 16 megapixels, which can be significant for DSLR users.
- Original quality – Limited free storage: Uses your Google Account’s 15 GB of free storage. Recommended if you take photos with a DSLR camera and want to maintain the exact original quality. Recommended for printing large banners or to store your original files. Store your photos and videos exactly as you captured them.
Google Photos will store unlimited video for free at 1080p quality. This is pretty big for me, as my videos take up the most space and right now I don’t pay to back them up in the cloud – only on external hard drives. If you upload something 4K, it will downsize to 1080p.
As you might expect with Google, they have also tried their best to make searching through your huge image library as easy as possible:
VISUAL SEARCH: Your photos are now searchable by the places and things that appear in your photos. Looking for that fish taco you ate in Hawaii? Just search “Hawaii” or “food” to find it even if it doesn’t have a description.
There is even facial recognition that groups photos with the same face. The app automatically creates collages of similar photos, albums of photos taken at the same time and place, and even animations.
Amazon Prime members can get free unlimited photo storage, but only 5 GB of free video storage.
Here are the links for the Web interface, Android app, and Apple iOS app.
The Best Credit Card Bonus Offers – November 2024
Big List of Free Stocks from Brokerage Apps
Best Interest Rates on Cash - November 2024
Free Credit Scores x 3 + Free Credit Monitoring
Best No Fee 0% APR Balance Transfer Offers
Little-Known Cellular Data Plans That Can Save Big Money
How To Haggle Your Cable or Direct TV Bill
Big List of Free Consumer Data Reports (Credit, Rent, Work)
The interface is much better than before, and the search has been useful so far. It’s great if you know the date of the photos you are looking for, you can just pull all of them up that way. Previously you had to scroll through an entire month.
I have only encountered one catch so far: If you already have more than 15GB of photos in their original size, there doesn’t seem to be any way to downgrade the images to fit the requirements for unlimited storage. I tried contacting Google Help, but I have not yet received any response.
Does anyone have an ideas? The only thing I could think of was downloading all the photos and reuploading, but that seems like a hassle as I have 100GB+ on Google right now. I’d love to save the $10 per month I’m currently paying.
Jonathan,
Can you post about what the downsides of this are? As you implied, they now have your data – what can/will they do with it? I’m a bit uncomfortable putting pictures of my family on the internet at all, I don’t use facebook, etc.
Thanks!
There’s always the tradeoff. Google will be analyzing your images and autotagging them (face recognition, place recognition, etc). Same as how it analyzes your email if you use gmail.
Putting photos on the cloud means that they could easily become public to the entire world either by your accidental mistake, a bug in their software, or less likely by a hacker.
Google can do whatever the hell they want with your pics, I don’t back up my pictures to any online service. The risks far outweigh the convenience.
“You can either choose to have Google downsize anything with a higher resolution to 16 GB, or they will give you 15 GB of space to keep them at original size.”
That confused me at first, but now I understand. Basically, you can choose “High quality”, which will give you unlimited space, but downsize any images higher than 16 megapixels. Or you can choose “Original quality”, which will not downsize images, but then you are limited to 15 GB of cloud storage (same as before).
FYI for you photo enthusiasts, even at “Original Quality”, the photos are still run through some kind of compression that may alter them/leave artifacts.
Also, most of my old photos are under 16MP but they count against my storage limit because they were uploaded when the free max resolution was 2048×2048. If anyone figures out how to batch edit the old photos so they can re-uploaded to take advantage of the new 16MP limit, you’d be my hero!
“even at “Original Quality”, the photos are still run through some kind of compression that may alter them/leave artifacts.”
Whoa whoa whoa. If that is true, that is totally wack. Do you have a source for that info? This is the first I’ve heard of it.
I was really excited until I read that. If that’s true then I guess I’ll have to find another provider of cloud storage since I really want to back up lossless photos. It’s a shame since everything else about this seems perfect.
Jonathan,
I think you may have some responsibility since this is your post to look into the concerns in these comments and give the full story on this new offering from Google. Unless this is just an advertisement for googles feature.
Thanks,
Chris
I’ve been on vacation the last 10 days, so please do your own research as an adult, I don’t know that the claims these comments make are even true myself. I can tell you that this is not an advertisement and I receive no compensation whatsoever even if a billion folks sign up for Google Photos. I personally will plan to use the service to backup videos as stated in my post.
“FYI for you photo enthusiasts, even at “Original Quality”, the photos are still run through some kind of compression that may alter them/leave artifacts.”
Can you please provide a source or document to support this claim for images under 16 megapixels?
I apologize, Jonathan. I misinterpreted an article that I read and caused some confusion amongst your readers. “Original quality” should preserve the image quality (at any resolution), but will count against your quota. “Normal quality” (less than 16MP) will be run through Google’s compression algorithm, but will not count against your quota. The compression is significant but it is what helps them to provide the service for free.
Thanks for confirming. I am learning as well, I was only working off the Google press release and main site when writing the original version of this post. High quality will compress everything to save space, but it is designed to be “light” enough that anything under 16 megapixels will supposedly have minimal degradation of visual quality. I’m sure there will be some analysis done by the shutterbug sites. Original quality is, as suggested, original quality but does not offer unlimited storage.
I’m sure this will end up well for everyone. No thanks Google.
I’m not sold on this either. I guess I need to compare the risk of losing all my photos in a physical hard drive crash (or two) vs the risk of Google doing something nefarious with my photos. They already have all my emails…
ALL hosted cloud-based pics will become accessible to gov search, and commercial buyers, its just a matter of time(read the T&Cs)…
far-fetched scenario…
lets say your pics are stored in the [tagged/facial recog] cloud…
the neighbors kid in your party pics goes missing, and your party pics provide the local gov with a recent image for ‘missing kid’ posters, …thats good.
however, that unknown-to-you spectator in the background of your party pics is on the terrorist watch list, now the feds are knocking at your door…, not good.
*both scenarios assume the gov went thru proper channels to gain access to the hosts database, …but they wouldn’t need your consent(read the hosts T&Cs).
Been using it for about a year as well and it’s pretty great, other than a few issues with the interface. The one I can think of off the top of my head is how there is no way to simply select a photo and see what albums it’s been added to. Very annoying, as I’m sure I repeatedly add the same photos to the same album for about half my photos.