We asked, you told us: You don't want to pay for Google Photos storage

Google left many users disappointed when it announced plans to end free Google Photos storage. Starting June 1, 2021, you’ll have to pay for a Google One subscription if your photos spill past your free 15GB Google Drive space. Thankfully, there are many Google Photos alternatives already out there. It’s just a question of if you want to jump ship or not.

With that in mind, we asked you, our readers, if you’re willing to pay for storing your media on Google Photos. Here’s how you voted in our poll.

Will you pay to store your media in Google Photos?

Results

Naturally, many of our readers are unwilling to pay for a Google service that’s been free for the past five years. From a total of 2,115 votes, a resounding 48.2% of our poll respondents will switch to other free alternatives to Google Photos.

Meanwhile, 19% of the poll takers are ready to shell out extra for a Google One subscription. 25% are still not sure about what they’ll do and will see how things develop.

A tiny fraction (7.6%) of our polled readers voted to say that they’ll pay for a different media storage service.

Your comments

• cfischer69: I was looking for the “hell no” option. To anyone who is going to rely on the new promise that your existing pictures will be grandfathered: how long until that promise is broken? If I’m going to pay to store my photos, it won’t be to Google.
• The One: So, I pay x dollars for y amount of cloud storage, and in a year or two or three, google raises the price arbitrarily. That leaves me stuck paying more money for google to host my content, and this repeats until I die? I’m not seeing the benefit.
• Austin Eschweiler: This might be the kick to start using my Plex server as my photo storage, too.
• rap: If I do local storage, then I have to pay to back up my local storage. I want my stuff somewhere in the cloud. I do back up to Prime too, but I’m not sure how much is included there and I may run out there too. I’ll probably pay when I run out of space. Google has a tool to estimate when you’ll run out and mine says a year. A lot can happen in that time though.
• Jarrod: I have a family share plan and three out of five of us have a pixel, so it won’t really affect us anyway. Pretty soon, four out of five of us will have a Pixel (My wife just won’t give up on iPhone). But, just to be on the absolutely safe side, I’ve been paying for the 200 GB plan for months. Even way before all of this. It’s mainly because I like to store my photos at full resolution. Unfortunately, going forward, I’ll probably have to use the free high-definition version.
• Nikolas Spiridakis: I get there are many storage alternatives, but where else can you find a service with an AI which is that good? I mean, if you’ve ever used gphotos you know that it categorizes things, identifies faces, you can search photos by describing them, etc. Those things are hard to find…