Rivals aside, Google Photos does plenty to justify a modest monthly fee. Google Photos is a very smart way to store your photos Note that unlimited image storage isn’t available to Prime members in Australia. If your image collection will continue to grow, it’s well worth considering – even if you don’t plan on using the additional subscription benefits. With dedicated smartphone and Fire device apps, it’s also just as accessible. But it is a real steal for those with sizeable libraries.
More importantly, it also includes unlimited free storage space for full-resolution images.Īmazon’s photo backup service isn’t quite as slick as Google Photos. For the single monthly fee of US$12.99 / £7.99, an Amazon Prime subscription bags you free fast delivery and access to Amazon’s library of video content. And that’s where Amazon Photos enters the equation. Above 2TB, the next Google One tier is 10TB, which carries a significant cost increase. That all changes if your library is bigger. More to the point, any marginal saving is unlikely to justify the significant time, effort and bandwidth that will probably be involved in downloading and transferring all of your uploaded shots to an alternative backup provider – unless they’re supported by Google’s Takeout service (which iCloud and Amazon Photos are not). In short, if your image library is already stored on Google Photos – and it’s less than 2TB in size – you’ll struggle to find cheaper expansion options than the ones offered by Google. There is cheaper cloud storage out there, but not with the same smart features and cross-platform accessibility offered by Google Photos. That’s slightly more than the equivalent iCloud plan, but less than or comparable to most other cloud photo backup options on a monthly basis. The 2TB Google One plan will set you back $9.99 / £7.99 / AU$12.49 per month. It’s a similar situation for higher capacities. And that’s for image files of any quality, including uncompressed originals. That’s a good chunk of space at a pocket-money price. For the sum of $1.99 / £1.59 / AU$2.49 per month, you’ll get 100GB of storage capacity across all Google products, including Google Drive.
Even if your shooting habits mean you do need to expand your account capacity, the cheapest Google One subscription tier compares favorably to the upgrade fees of rival backup providers.