Image conscious: what you need to know about Google pic charge

From Tuesday, storing your smartphone photos with Google Photos will no longer be free ­beyond the first 15GB. So what should you do?

Google will charge you $2.49 a month, or $24.99 a year, for 100GB of storage, and $4.39 a month, or $43.99 a year, for 200GB, which should be ample storage for most.

From Tuesday, storing your smartphone photos with Google Photos will no longer be free ­beyond the first 15GB. So what should you do?

If you’ve invested in building a large photo collection with Google Photos, and many millions have, you may be annoyed about being trapped into periodic payments that you never anticipated.

Nevertheless Google’s parent Alphabet, which posted a profit of $22.5 billion in the first quarter, feels it’s time users paid up.

Until now, users had 15GB of free storage for their Gmail and Google Drive files with unlimited Google Photos storage if you let Google compress photos and video to “high quality” rather than original quality. Some early Google adopters were granted 31GB of storage.

Now, any photos you add will fall within the 15GB otherwise you pay. That applies to Android users, where Google Photos is the main photo app, and Apple users who adopted Google Photos as a free photo storage option. The exception is those who buy Google’s own Pixel phones, who will still enjoy unlimited storage.

So the question is whether to pay or use another service. Some users may ditch Google Photos on principle, but if your photo collection isn’t that big, changing is probably not worth it.

Google will charge you $2.49 a month, or $24.99 a year, for 100GB of storage, and $4.39 a month, or $43.99 a year, for 200GB, which should be ample storage for most. However, the payments add up and over 10 years Google will siphon $439 or more from you for 200GB.

There is one concession. Google says photos you’ve uploaded before June 1 won’t be counted in the quota, so your storage requirements may not be so large.

If you think your collection will grow more than 200GB, then it’s time to rethink your storage entirely, as the next tier with Google is 2 terabytes of storage for $124.99 a year. There is nothing in between.

If you’re an iPhone user, you could switch to Apple’s similarly priced iCloud storage: $1.49/month for 50GB, $4.49/month for 200GB and $14.99/month for 2TB. Again there is no option ­between 200GB and 2TB.

You could break free of both ecosystems. Sites that offer unlimited space are good value. ImageShack charges $US37.99 ($49.26) for unlimited space and unlimited uploads. SmugMug similarly charges $US55 ($71) for unlimited full-resolution storage. In both cases you pay more for professional services if you really need them.

You could try other cloud options. Services such as Microsoft Office 365 include storage - 365 Personal offers 1TB. Amazon Prime may offer unlimited photo storage in the US, but in Australia be aware the free storage is limited to 5GB.

I use another option, a NAS (network attached storage) box, a little black box that acts as my cloud. Its smartphone apps diligently upload anything I snap or video to my home cloud. Currently I have about 6TB available.

Do-it-yourself cloud is a great option, but you’ll need to create periodic off-site backups to safeguard your data. That can be as simple as copying your photos onto an external drive and storing it away from home to avoid paid backups.

Google has argued the case for charging citing the number of photos that are stored but never viewed. It says Google Photos has stored more than 4 trillion photos and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded.

Under its inactive account policy Google can delete your photos and data from services you haven’t used for two years.