Whether or not you consider Google Photos a free service is complicated, despite the simple premise. Google Photos launched in 2015 as a free service to house your photos with unlimited storage for videos and images. But this changed in 2021, when Google announced a hard cap of 15 gigabytes on Photos’ free storage, sharing this limit with Gmail and Drive, to “keep pace with the growing demand for storage.” While a few Pixel phones retained their free photo storage after 2021, Google Photos mostly moved to an optional subscription model that requires Google One to expand your storage.
Google Photos remains as important as other essential Android apps, since it’s free to download and lets you store a limited amount of photos, whether they are high-quality or not. If you actually want to take advantage of every Google Photos feature without having to stress about storage, though, you’re going to have to pay for a Google One subscription. This means Google Photos is free to use, with some limitations that ultimately require a subscription to offer you the full service. So it’s both free and paid, all at once.
It’s easy to see why answering whether Google Photos is free can be confusing when the features and pricing to unlock Google Photos’ full capabilities are part of a subscription for a seemingly separate service. But we’re here to set the record straight.
Google Photos comes with a few limitations and a paywall
There is free, then there is freemium. Google Photos falls somewhere in the latter camp, which means it’s free to install and use with restricted features, but you ultimately require a Google One subscription to access all its functions. Technically, this counts as a free app on the Play Store, but whether you see it as free or premium is a different story. If you want to bump up your default 15GB of Google Photos storage while gaining access to a few AI features, you’ll eventually want to pay for a Google One plan.
The Basic tier of Google One grants access to the service’s new Google Photos AI features for $1.99 per month, and it includes 100GB of extra storage. Features like Magic Editor (limited to ten uses on the Basic Google One plan) and Portrait Blur are part of every plan from Basic and up, and every subscription tier also includes automatic photo backups that will count toward your storage limit. The Premium plan costs $9.99 per month and offers 2TB of storage, but it doesn’t include any extra AI features for Google Photos beyond the Basic plan.
If you choose the most expensive Google One subscription, the AI Pro plan with 2TB, your videos and photos will count towards the Photos storage limit, as there are no longer any unlimited storage options. The only reason to choose the AI Pro plan for Google One is if you need more than ten uses of the Magic Editor per month, as it offers the same 2TB storage as the Pro plan. If you’re a lucky Google Pixel smartphone owner, features like Magic Editor and Magic Eraser are already free and unlimited.
How many pictures can Google Photos store for free?
Every Google account comes with 15GB of free storage. If you used this only to store pictures in Google Photos, it could hold somewhere around 2,000 to 4,000 high-quality photos in JPEG format, assuming they’re between 4 megabytes and 7 megabytes each. But that’s just your default storage. If you subscribe to the Basic 100GB Google One subscription, you could store 12,000 to 25,000 high-quality images, which is quite a jump from the free plan.
If you need the AI Pro plan with 2TB, the maximum storage a Google One subscription can offer, it would support over 400,000 photos, or even more than 60,000 RAW files, if you’re a professional photographer who needs to store every photo uncompressed.
If video is more your thing, you can store between two and four hours of high-definition footage (1080p) with 15GB, assuming you use all your storage for that. With the 100GB Basic Google One plan, your storage can hold up to 25 hours of video at that same quality. With the 2TB option, you can store up to 5,000 hours of 1080p video or save about 130 hours of 4K footage. Whether you need this extra storage depends on how many photos and videos you plan to keep in Google Photos, so choose wisely. At the very least, if you find the Basic plan’s 100GB isn’t enough, it’s very easy to switch to the Premium or AI Pro for their 2TB storage.
