The farewell to unlimited free space for photos and videos was announced in November. Now we get to the heart: from June 1st, those who exceed 15 Gb of content saved on Google Photos, one of the most used and appreciated services in the Big G ecosystem, will have to pay. Don’t worry: everything that has already been uploaded will not contribute to reaching the limit, so there is no need to download and delete photos from the weekend in Paris or those from recent birthdays. The 15 Gb threshold will be counted starting from the contents saved on the “cloud storage” service, ie remote storage, from June. In practice, uploading files will consume the basic free storage space granted by Google for each account. Which are precisely 15 Gb.
Mountain View had explained it: it is impossible to support this totally free service, born in 2015, with such high amounts of data in the long term. Although, to be honest, the vast majority of people will not have to worry about a long time: according to the analysis of Big G, 80% of those who use Photos have at least 3 years of tranquility in front of them. In the sense that on average, at the rate at which it has uploaded Full HD clips and high quality shots at a maximum resolution of 16 Mp in recent years, it will reach the ceiling of 15 Gb around 2024. Obviously it also depends on how they affect the total budget. the other services of your account that rely on that free space, from Drive to Gmail with its attachments.
How much will we spend from June onwards
When that threshold is reached, the figure will still remain reasonable: the payment plans of Google One (as the entire cloud services platform of the American giant was renamed some time ago) currently start at € 1.99 per month. for 100 Gb to go up to 49.99 euros for 10 Tb, useful only for high-level professional realities. In between, there is the offer from 2.99 euros for 200 Gb which seems the most convenient for those who work with the mail, upload photos regularly and also take full advantage of the Drive space. Not to mention that there is time until June 1st to move your entire photo library to Google Photos at no cost and without limits.
It must be said that Google Photos is also appreciated because it is a versatile and efficient service: the photos are organized automatically and can be easily searched starting from keywords, places or other parameters; backup is possible from any device; there are integrated editing and photo editing tools, as well as sharing tools, and you can use third-party applications to make albums, print them and much more.
Competitive cloud services
One of the alternatives, which is free but in reality you pay (it is included in the Prime subscription), is that of Amazon: it allows unlimited storage of high-resolution photos with 5 Gb of Amazon Drive space where, if desired, you can ” park ”also videos. But we need the 36 euros per year of the subscription to the e-commerce giant, with which we ensure a large number of other services, on all free deliveries of millions of products in one day.
If you don’t have many photos, Dropbox can make sense too, although the free threshold is limited to 2 Gb. Then there are the free 5 Gb of Apple’s iCloud, reserved for owners of Apple devices, but in reality also open to those who use Windows through a dedicated desktop app. Same free capacity for Microsoft OneDrive, which like iCloud then offers more space by paying different figures, and for iDrive.
A thousand free photos can also be uploaded on Flickr, on the Swiss pCloud platform (10 Gb free with preview for raw files and various other features that make it a complete platform) and on Mega by the infamous Kim Dotcom (the naturalized German entrepreneur Finnish Kim Schmitz), which offers 50 GB free for all, even with a high level of encryption.