SWITCH FROM GOOGLE PHOTOS
Before Befo free unlimited storage ends (soon!)
On 1 June, Google Photos will stop offering unlimited free storage to its millions of users. Instead, every photo and video you upload to the service from your PC, phone or tablet will count towards the 15GB of storage that comes with every Google account, which is shared across Gmail, Google Drive and Photos.
Google is making this change to encourage us to pay for a Google One subscription, which costs from £1.59 per month for 100GB of extra storage. If you’re a heavy Photos user, this means you could soon run out of space, even if your pictures are stored at ‘High quality’ (which previously didn’t count towards the storage limit) rather than ‘Original quality’. When that happens Google will start deleting your excess content.
To help you preserve your precious images before time runs out, we’ve rounded up the best free alternatives to Google Photos and provided step-by-step instructions for downloading your photos, so you can transfer them to another service before it’s too late.
The best alternatives to Google Photos
Although there isn’t a direct equivalent to Google Photos, which offers unlimited free storage to all users – for a few more weeks at least, there are several close contenders. Here we rank our top three alternative services.
GOLD
Amazon Photos www.snipca.com/37906
What we like
Amazon Photos (see screenshot below) offers many of the same features as Google Photos, including online storage of full-resolution photos and videos, automatic syncing and backup across your PC, laptop, phone and tablet, as well as options for sharing pictures and organising them into albums. It also tags photos based on their location and subject (including people’s faces), which makes them easy to find, and provides editing tools such as filters, cropping and brightness and contrast adjustment.
What we don’t like
If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, the service gives you unlimited free photo storage and 5GB for videos, but nonmembers get only 5GB for everything. Extra storage costs from £1.49 per month for 100GB, which is only 10p less than Google’s new charge. Also, if you cancel your Prime membership, you’ll lose access to any content that exceeds the 5GB allowance, and it will eventually be deleted.
SILVER
Degoo https://degoo.com
What we like
Degoo’s free plan gives you a generous 100GB of encrypted online storage for your photos (and lets you earn more by referring friends), which you can upload from your PC or via its Android and IOS apps. Your images are stored at their original resolution in a simple gallery (see screenshot below) that makes it easy to share, comment on and download them. Degoo also offers an impressive range of tools for editing and enhancing your pictures, applying overlays and filters, adding text and frames, and more.
What we don’t like
If you want to use Degoo on more than three devices, remove adverts and prevent your account being deleted after
90 days of inactivity, you’ll need to pay £1.89 per month for its Pro plan (which also increases storage to 500GB). Unlike Google and Amazon Photos, Degoo doesn’t identify picture content or location of your shots to speed up searches, but you can add photo descriptions.
BRONZE
Flickr www.flickr.com
What we like
Flickr (see screenshot below) lost thousands of users in 2019 when it reduced its free storage limit from 1TB to 1,000 photos, but it’s still a good option if you want to share high-quality images at their original resolution. If you need unlimited storage, you can upgrade to Flickr Pro (for £4.66 per month). Flickr’s Photo Editor provides a small but sophisticated set of tools for perfecting your pictures, and its website
and mobile app make it easy to organise your shots into albums and add info. What we don’t like
Aside from the measly free storage (and non-refundable paid-for plan), you need to tweak your privacy settings to stop your photos being visible to anyone on the web. Click your profile icon, choose Settings, ‘Privacy & Permissions’, then click Edit next to ‘Who will be able to see’ and change the default settings to ‘Only you’ or ‘Your friends and family’.
Download your photos from Google Photos
To avoid Google deleting your photos
should you exceed your storage limit, you can download a backup copy of all your images (and videos). This can then be uploaded to another photo-storage service or copied to an external hard drive.
To download specific pictures at their original, non-optimised quality, click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner and choose ‘Download original’. To save an entire album, select ‘Download all’ to export the album as a ZIP file. This method isn’t ideal if you have lots of pictures stored in Google Photos, so it makes more sense to back up everything in one go using Google’s Takeout service – see our Workshop below.