Google Photos
 

So, you all probably know that Google Photos won't be uploading your images for free anymore. Once you hit that 15 gb limit, you have to pay up or delete stuff.

There are many articles about this. I was wondering what others here will do.

Some of the better suggestions, IMO:
1. Go old school. Start manually saving your stuff off your phone regulary to an external drive (very cheap nowadays) and keep a backup or two of that (one in an offsite place or the Cloud, if possible). Because we do have to manage and keep other files safe anyway, going old school is a great way of keeping your photos. You can use any software to manage and view them. Cons: yep it's more of a pain to share, but you have control over your photos. You can also load them onto a media server at home and have access and share them that way.

2. Build your own web server...I think this is could be a good way - you can use sync tools and copy images up to your server, and it's all managed by you and is cost effective. The only issues are: difficult to build for non-technical folks, and difficult to manage (can get attacked and how will you manage that?)

3. Just out and out pay Google for their continued storage of your photos. Do you think this is a good plan?

4. Pay for some other service (Flickr and others)

Some of the less dependable suggestions, IMO:
Microsoft's services - I've found if you don't login to Microsoft's services for a long time, your stuff can poof. Mine has on two occasions. This isn't to be relied upon unless you login regularly and will always do so.

Amazon - if you have Prime, upload all the photos you want! The problem is, if you leave Prime, I have read that your photos account will be locked, then deleted after some time of not paying. I'm not sure one way or the other about this, but I opt on the side of caution.

I have some additional time to think about it since I am using a Pixel 4a with unlimited uploads at High Quality. I may get a Pixel 5 this fall when the new phones get announced and the old phones get discounted, which would further extend the time. In addition, I periodically download all my original photos and store them locally on a couple of PCs and on a couple of portable hard drives. I have investigated most of the other services and in every case the cost would be either the same or higher than using Google Photos, which has superior functionality. I think the best option for most people is to subscribe to Google One and also gain actual customer service that can help you recover your account when something goes wrong. That alone is worth more than the price of the lowest tier of Google One. I rely on storing everything in the cloud due to not having a consistent year-round living place where I can easily manage PCs, hard drives, servers, etc. My offline backups can only be done sporadically, and sometimes not for months at a time. Also, I highly value the ability to lose my phone, have my PC break or be stolen, or suffer a house fire and know that all of my most important data is safely and easily available. It is great to simply purchase a new phone or PC, log into Google, and there everything is safe and sound and useful.

There's nothing to stop you opening an additional Google account, is there?

I luckily have access to a few Google Legacy (Grandfathered) accounts - one of them a 50 user account - so I've no shortage of available online storage.

Saying that, I tend NOT to store all my precious photos online - I've got local backups for photos taken with my cameras, and use the online storage for the photos taken on my 'phone.

I have several different 'photo galleries', both online and local. A few with my email service, Fastmail, one being http://emdpics.somdcomputerguy.com/ :cool:

I use a 'photo gallery script' on my website to display a bunch of other photos. I really like that with this script, I only have to have a directory and sub-directories to contain the image files, with photo comments, captions and other data stored in another file. I have several local copies of that image directory as well.

- Bruce

I don't let my cell phones "back" up or store my photos to Google (or anywhere for that matter). I store them locally only. They are backed up on a daily basis, locally. Not much different that keeping them in albums or shoe boxes.

I just looked at my Google Photos. How about that, I have a few there. Some pictures I took in 2014 of a fire two businesses down form ours. I deleted them.

I would just pay Google for extra storage.
It is easy to use and is very reliable and in the UK 100GB is only about £15 for a year so for me it's a no-brainer.

Wow PAY to DELETE stuff??

How silly.........

What do you mean?

Well it just seems silly if you wanna delete something ya have to pay :(

Who is doing that. If your referring to my post, I am not paying for Google Photos.

Hmmmmmm im all confused!!

Me too :confused:

Yeah one could open additional Google accounts, but it's not optimal (which account was that image on?!)

Mostly it's my phone photos which go up online. I'm definitely working on a solution that works for me though.

I've been trying out PhotoSync, which will sync my phone photos to my PC. The pc has to be on for this to happen. I guess if I like this, I need to figure out a secondary backup method (what if something happens to the drive). I guess I don't like paying any service, other than my email, because I'm not working and it's just money out the window if I can find another solution.

You could create a new Google account, then set up Partner Sharing between the new account and your original account.

Any photos then saved to the new account may also be viewed on the original account.