Is there a free or cheap way to back up photos?
The era of flipphone cameras that produce tiny, pixelated images is over. The time when we used to bring in film to our local Walmart or pharmacy to get developed has passed as well.
Now that we’re all taking and storing hundreds or thousands of large digital images, and the cloud storage industry has matured beyond competing for market share, it’s starting to cost us.
What’s the best, cheapest solution for photo storage entering 2024? That’s what one Clark listener wanted to know.
Asked Jacob in Pennsylvania: “As a college student, I want to avoid signing up for too many paid subscriptions while I am still in school. Unfortunately, my Google cloud is running out of storage and it seems like I will need to change how I back up my photos. Any advice on where to find free or onetime purchase cloud space that I can use to back up my photos?”
The typical 12MP camera (12 million megapixels) in today’s smartphones produces photos that are typically single-digit megabytes (MB) in size. Some of the newest smartphone camera images can be dozens of MBs each.
The Facebook and Instagram era has transformed every vacation, Sunday brunch and backyard play session with our children into amateur photo sessions. According to one site, the average person keeps 630 photos on their phone. That number seems low for my family and friends.
And when you get a new phone, the images you’ve taken and collected previously tend to travel along with your SIM card or cloud storage.
The cumulative effect can eat up your Google
Drive, iPhone or Samsung storage in a hurry. Especially since Google has changed its policies.
Google previously allowed unlimited photo storage. Now you have a storage cap. And you have to pay at least $24 a year for additional storage. That gets you 100 GB of storage.
“That may not be enough for you. Because you may be one of the people who takes 4,000 photos every single day,” Clark says.
“If you have an Amazon Prime membership, then you have free photo storage from Amazon that nobody uses, as best I can tell. That would be a way that you can offload all your pictures and do it for free.”