Once you have a free Google Photos account, you can start populating it with pictures. Tip: Sometimes, even when you have an old Gmail account, creating a separate one for Google Photos is a good idea to avoid having all your mail taking up shared space. If you don’t yet have a Google Photos account (or a Gmail account), starting one is easy: If you want to save your photos and videos in Google Photos in their original quality, however, the app will count them against your Google Drive storage limit, which also includes your Gmail and any other files stored in Google Drive, except for Google files like Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and any other files in the “Shared with me” section.īy default, a free Google Drive account gives you 15 GB, but you have the option to expand storage by upgrading to Google One, with plans for 100 GB ($1.99 a month), 200 GB ($2.99), or 2 TB ($9.99). But it is considerably lower than what most cameras are capable of today. This doesn’t sound that bad as 16 MP is plenty for most screens and 1080p is Full HD. You can really get unlimited storage on Google Photos if you allow your photos to be downsampled to 16 megapixels and your videos to 1080p. In reality, as many things are, this statement came with a caveat. Google Photos was first released as a standalone app in 2015 and immediately gained widespread attention for its unlimited free photo storage promotion.

Let’s explore all the questions around the Google Photos storage limit and see how you can leverage it properly to get the best deal possible. But the one that attracted the most attention in the past few years has been Google Photos, mostly because it offers free photo storage for all. There are quite a few cloud storage providers available right now: Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, etc. Another solution is moving some photos to the cloud. more megapixels), photos weigh more and put a strain on the storage capacity of our devices.īuying smartphones with more storage space would seem like a good idea, but those models often cost hundreds of dollars more.

Photography has gone mobile, as we almost exclusively use our smartphones to take and share pictures. Replace Mac defaults and discover new gems in one suite.įew people today keep their photos on external hard drives, like most of us did just about 10 years ago.

How to get photos off google drive