The best Google Photos alternatives you may already be paying for

Until now, one of Google Photos' big lures has been the promise of unlimited photo and video storage. To take advantage of that, you have to agree to use Google's compression settings – it calls that "High Quality" uploads – but otherwise you've been free to store as much in the cloud as you want. As of June 1, 2021, though, that all changes.

From that point, all new uploads will count against your Google storage: the amount of cloud storage you have as part of your free, or paid, Google account. Everyone gets 15GB to begin with when they sign up, and until now that's been shared between services like Drive and Gmail. This policy change adds Google Photos to that sharing list.

If you're getting close to maxing out your free storage, there's a new tool which might identify some easy candidates for deletion. Or, Google has various One plans to subscribe to: they start at $1.99 per month for 100GB. That capacity is, again, shared across your various Google services, plus you can add family uses to it too. To be honest, Google's storage prices are pretty competitive, but if you've been used to free Google Photos then you might still want to shop around. After all, some services you're already paying for could have alternative cloud storage you can take advantage of.

Like Amazon and Google, Apple's iCloud Photos service offers a chunk of free storage for all sign-ups. You get 5GB to begin with, though that's shared across iCloud Drive, Notes, Backups, and other iCloud services. You can opt to add more iCloud storage with plans starting from $0.99 per month.

However, a lot of Apple users have already signed up to Apple One. That bundles together Apple Music, Apple TV+, and Apple Arcade into a single monthly payment – from $14.95/mo for the Individual plan – but also actually includes at least 50GB of iCloud storage too.

You can use that to store more photos and video, and automatic uploads from your phone or tablet are straightforward too – assuming you're within the Apple ecosystem. If you're not using an iPhone or iPad, or indeed a Mac, then the experience is less streamlined. Apple has web interfaces that can be used on Android phones and Windows PCs, but it's definitely not as clean an experience overall. Still, if you're deep in the Apple world, iCloud Photos' tight integration with your iPhone takes some beating.

Most photographers are no stranger to Photoshop, and Adobe Creative Cloud offers various plans with access to the editing software and other apps like Lightroom. If you're already signed up, though, it's worth remembering that you get at least 20GB of cloud storage bundled with the regular Photoshop + Lightroom package. That's priced at $9.99/mo.

If you're a Lightroom-only subscriber, meanwhile, that's also $9.99/mo, but it comes with a full 1TB of storage in Adobe's cloud.

Adobe expects that storage to be used by those doing image editing, so the downside is that the mobile experience isn't quite as seamless as Google Photos or the other services. There's no auto-upload, for example: instead you manually choose which images you want to back up in the cloud using the Adobe Creative Cloud apps for iOS and Android. That may involve a little more work, but it does help take advantage of storage you could already be paying for.