There seems to be some confusion about Google Photos charging as of today, June 1st. Many seem to be panicking and looking for ways to pull their photos off Google. Wow. There is no need. All the photos you have on Google photos right now are not charged against your allocated space and will not be charged for them now.
It is only photos that are uploaded June 1st and beyond that will be charged against your allocated space. Now, what is allocated space?
Managing Allocated Space
When you signed up for a Google account you received 15 GB of allocated space at no charge to you. As with many of the other cloud services, if you would like to have more space allocated to you, you simply purchase that space. With Google, $19.99 a year gets you an additional 100 GB of space. Sign up for Google One and the 15 GB ups to 100 GB.
There are many other cloud services available for storing pictures and any other types of data. OneDrive from Microsoft gives you an allocation of 5 GB. Dropbox gives you 2 GB. With Amazon Prime, there is still an unlimited allocation for photos. However, Prime does cost $12.99 a month. so that one was never free.
When you sign up for your Google account that 15 GB of allocated space is used to store your email, their attachments, and any non-Google formatted files, such as those that you create in Google Docs which are stored at no charge.
You can see how much space you have available in your Google Cloud by opening your Google Account. Locate Account Storage and click Manage Storage. Notice that my Photos count is 0 GB.
To check on how many photos you have in your Google Cloud, open your Google Dashboard. Here you can see I have over 20,000 and they are all free. Any photos I add from today on will add to that amount and take away from my allocated space. The 20,000 I had already stored will still not take away from my allocation.
Depending upon the digital camera or cell phone that you used to take pictures, the size of each picture will vary from 1 to 5 MB. Your Google Cloud has fifteen times 1,000 MB. So if your camera takes 1 MB-sized pictures, you have room for 15,000 pictures in addition to all of those you’ve already uploaded prior to June 1st that still remain free. If your camera takes 5 MB pictures, you have room for 3,000 of them before you run out of available allocated space. What happens after that? For $19.99 a year you can add an additional 100 GB of allocated space which will give you room for thousands of additional pictures for the future.
I hope this cleared up any confusion.
Dick
More Google Photos Articles:
- Google Storage Changes Coming In June
- How To Download Your Pictures From Google Photos
- How To Send Google Photos In Email
Remember when MS gave OneDrive unlimited storage and then screwed everyone by taking it all back? Yeah– great fun by a greedy company. Looks like greedy Google is following suit. After all, these days you can “grab’em by the p***y and still get the top seat, so no more shock nor retribution for sociopaths who promise now/cheat later, I guess.
Dick Evans, you know more than most how many companies, headed by good people (enthusiasts) there were in tech’s infancy. How different would our tech world (real world) might be if Gates & Jobs hadn’t made it their life’s work to knife all competition into oblivion, from the get-go? It was mainly Gates’ doing, a guy who was more concerned with power and money than enthusiasm. Makes me sick to think of it. People are only now becoming aware of the guy’s skeletons.
Whenever I try to upgrade I get this:
Google Play purchases are not supported in your country. Unfortunately you will not be able to complete purchases.
So if I don’t run away from Google Photos, I will eventually be out of space under this new arrangement.
What country are you in? You could create an additional Google account and then get 15 GB more…
A Caribbean island. Don’t know why Google restricts us in this way.
I suppose you’re correct about creating a second free Gmail account to get more space. That would of course mean we would have to look in two different accounts to find old photos.
You can share photos from one account to the other without taking up space on the other. Here is what a Google search found:
“Do shared photos take up space in Google Photos?
No, albums shared with you do not use your storage, but the storage of the owner.”
Give it a try and let me know…