What happens when free Google Photos storage is no longer free?

Google Photos has announced it will stop offering free unlimited storage for high-quality photos on June 1, 2021. Photos uploaded after the date will be counted towards the 15GB Drive cap. If the account is inactive or exceed the 15GB limitation for two years, Google may delete the photos after warning. Users will either need to pay for a recurring fee or look for an alternative if they run out of room.

- Maribelle Alba

This change of policy is projected to affect more than 1 billion users worldwide, with many wondering what they ought to do with their existing as well as future photos going forward. Several remedies are available in the market at the moment, such as shifting to other cloud storage services that offer freemium models, or simply upgrading your Google storage plan. Though most of the tier-1 public cloud storage vendors such as OneDrive, Amazon Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud offer some amount of free storage space, none of them exceeds Google’s whopping 15GB storage space which means that, ultimately, it all comes down to upgrading your public cloud storage plan regardless of platform.

For Google Drive, although there are several paid plans available for upgrade, if we consider that 256GB seems to be the base storage on SSD-based laptops like the MacBook or smartphones, storing this amount of data on the cloud can cost you around USD 120 per year! The annually accumulated fee could be a considerable expense.