If you've been taking photos with your mobile phone for years, you're probably caught between two fears: running out of space or losing irreplaceable memoriesGoogle Photos seemed like the perfect solution with its unlimited uploads, but that bargain is over and now every gigabyte counts. Meanwhile, phone memory fills up, 4K videos are huge, and "storage almost full" warnings are now a daily occurrence.
In this context, the big question is clear: Should I stick with Google Photos, switch to another cloud service, or opt for local storage (PC, hard drives, NAS…)? The answer isn't that simple, because every option has fine print, limitations, constraints, and, above all, medium- and long-term costs. We're going to combine everything we've learned from various real-world experiences and technical solutions so you can design your own strategy without losing photos… and without spending a fortune.
What's changed with Google Photos and why you can't just go "loosely" anymore
For years, Google Photos was a kind of digital paradise: Unlimited uploads “in high quality” and freeIt didn't matter how many photos you took or how many phones you changed; everything ended up in the Google cloud without you having to worry about space. But since June 2021, that unlimited storage disappeared, and now everything is added to the same fees. 15 GB shared between Google Photos, Gmail, and Google Drive.
This means that Every photo and video you upload to Google Photos takes up part of that quota.If you back up in "original quality", you fill up the space in record time; and if you use "Storage Saver" mode, you gain space, but at the cost of compression, lower resolution, and 4K videos reduced to 1080p.
Furthermore, Google has designed its ecosystem to be very difficult to let go of: When you delete photos from Google Photos, it also deletes them from your phone's storage.from your gallery. In other words, if you used the app trusting it completely, you may now find yourself cornered: either you pay for a Google One plan or you start juggling backups, deletions, and downloads.
That catchy design makes many people feel like Google He plays with his memories and with the fear of losing them.It doesn't help that, when the storage space is nearing its limit, insistent emails appear warning that you could stop receiving emails or that you could lose access to your photos if you don't do something (usually, pay).
Google Photos: advantages, limitations, and tricks to avoid wasting your money
Nevertheless, it would be unfair to deny that Google Photos remains an extremely powerful toolIts search engine for objects, colors, places, or people is one of the best on the market: you can type "orange" and find both orange fruits and sunsets; search for "beach," "mountains," or even certain animals, and locate specific moments in seconds.
Facial recognition is also outstanding: It identifies faces and lets you automatically group photos of friends and family.which makes it very easy to find "that person" in thousands of images. And the chronological organization, the memories from "X years ago," or the collaborative shared albums These are comforts that are hard to give up.
The problem arises when you run headlong into the 15 GB limit. That's where several strategies come into play. gaining air without erasing memories:
- Adjust upload quality: switch from “Original Quality” to “Storage Saver” for new photos.
- Convert photos already uploaded: compress what you have in original quality to save space.
- Clean up digital junk: screenshots, blurry photos, documents you no longer need, etc.
- Check Gmail and Drive: emails with huge attachments and old files that also take up those 15 GB.
From the app or website you can easily change the upload quality, or check How to free up storage in Google PhotosIf you choose “Storage saving”, Google compresses photos and videos to take up less spacePhotos over 16 megapixels are downscaled to that resolution, and 4K videos are converted to 1080p. In everyday use, the loss of quality is often not very noticeable on a mobile screen, but if you take careful photos or shoot in RAW, there is a clear degradation.
The most aggressive move to gain space is convert all content already uploaded to that saving modeFrom the Google Photos website, under "Manage storage," you can initiate the bulk compression process. However, it's irreversible: once compressed, there's no going back to the original quality. On the other hand, you can recover a significant amount of gigabytes if you've been uploading photos in their original format for years.
Another useful trick is to use the app's "Free up space" option: Delete from your mobile phone the photos and videos that are already backed up in the cloudBut it keeps them in your Google account. It's a quick way to gain local space without losing them online, although you're still limited by the 15 GB global limit.
A strategy to avoid getting trapped: how to use Google Photos without being held hostage
One of the harshest criticisms of Google Photos is that, once you get used to it, It seems there's no way out without paying.But there are ways to regain control, especially if you organize yourself well and are willing to mix cloud storage with local storage.
The first recommendation is Disable automatic backup and synchronization If you don't want to keep increasing your data allowance, you can move some of your photos and videos to areas of your phone where Google Photos doesn't have permission, such as a secure or private folder in your gallery from the phone. The trick is:
- Move important photos and videos to the secure or private folder in your gallery.
- Delete the copies that appear in Google Photos to free up account space.
- Move those files back from the secure folder to the normal gallery, without automatic synchronization.
With this system, The photos are still on your phone in the same order as before, but Google can no longer access them. because you have cut off synchronization and "unlinked" them from the service using methods to limit app accessYou still have space for Gmail, Drive, and occasional new uploads, but you no longer blindly depend on the cloud to preserve your memories.
The next sensible step is opt for manual backups on the computerConnecting your phone via cable or using apps like "Link to Windows" lets you periodically transfer your photos to a PC, where you can organize them into folders by year, event, or person. It's not as convenient as simply opening an app, but it's much less likely that a change in service terms will leave you without an alternative.
If you add to that an external hard drive or two copies in different placesThe risk of losing everything due to a single failure is greatly reduced. And you haven't had to commit to a monthly subscription forever.
Amazon Photos and other services: a real alternative to Google Photos?
Faced with Google's policy changes, many users looked to other cloud platforms. Among the most talked about is Amazon Photos, which It offers original quality photo storage for Amazon Prime customers.In other words, if you already pay for Prime, uploading images doesn't have an additional cost, and it keeps them uncompressed (if you use the correct options).
This makes Amazon Photos a kind of spiritual successor to what many missed in Google Photos: Save JPG, PNG, HEIC or even DNG/RAW files straight from the camerawithout an algorithm squashing them to save space. For those who shoot in RAW with third-party apps like Halide, or use their phone almost like a semi-professional camera, this is a huge plus.
There are testimonies from users who, after thinking they had lost their RAW photos due to lack of space on their mobile phone, realized that Amazon Photos kept them intact in the cloudBeing able to retrieve them later on the computer, develop them with tools like Lightroom, or consult the best photo editors for Android And squeezing out dynamic range and noise control is something that Google Photos, with its obsession with compression, didn't always allow.
In the field of automatic recognition, Amazon plays in a similar league but with nuances. Facial recognition works quite well.And it's relatively easy to find friends and family in the collection. However, the search function by concepts and colors doesn't quite reach the level of Google: searching for "orange" tends to return mostly fruit, not orange landscapes or scenes with that dominant hue.
Where Amazon Photos clearly falls short is in video. It only includes 5 GB free for videosFrom then on, you need to purchase additional storage. If you don't record much, it might not be a problem, but a single summer with a modern phone can easily add up to 100 GB of video or more. In that scenario, even Apple's or Google's 2 TB plans end up seeming like a short-term fix that will only lead to long-term problems.
The big problem: 4K videos and the storage space they consume
The photos take up a lot of space, yes, but Videos are the real storage hogsWith phones recording in 4K at 60 fps, advanced stabilization, and high bitrates, filling 100 GB of video in a few months is extremely easy. Previously, Google Photos offered a sort of lifeline: you uploaded everything compressed to 1080p, the file quality was slightly compromised, but at least you had a copy "forever."
The problem is that that compression was extreme: An 80 MB video could end up being reduced to 1,7 MBThe quality suffered considerably, although for many it was a small price to pay for having everything accessible and well-indexed in the cloud. You could search by color, by objects, by animals, and the video would appear in seconds.
With the end of unlimited storage, that safety net has been dismantled. Amazon Photos offers no clear solution for large videos without paying, and other similar services apply similar restrictions. Subscribing to 2 TB sounds like a lot, but with a few years of 4K video it might not be enough.especially if you're one of those people who records practically every trip or important family event.
Some users have looked for legal and technical loopholes, such as buying Older Google Pixel phones with unlimited lifetime storage for your photos and videosThese models, configured solely to function as "official uploaders," allow users to continue taking advantage of the unlimited uploads at original resolution that Google once offered to these devices. It's an extreme workaround, but for those who generate hundreds of gigabytes of video per year, it can be more cost-effective than a continuous subscription.
Even so, the general feeling is that There is no longer a clear equivalent to the old unlimited Google Photos for video.If you want to preserve them without loss, at the highest quality, and without depending on a third party that changes the rules of the game, the focus inevitably returns to local storage.
Local storage and NAS: set up your own “Google Photos” at home
Those who have many photos, many videos, and also a certain concern for privacy, usually end up thinking the same thing: set up your own cloud at homeThis can be something as simple as an external hard drive plugged into the PC or as advanced as a NAS (network storage server) with multiple disks, redundancy, and customized services.
There are cases of users who have built Custom NAS devices with tens of terabytesBy combining mechanical hard drives (for capacity) with SSDs (for speed), and leveraging robust file systems like ZFS in RAIDZ-type configurations, the goal is to have a well-organized "digital storage" where photos and videos are safe from single-drive failures.
To manage that NAS, there are specific operating systems such as Unraid, TrueNAS, Proxmox, OpenMediaVault or CasaOSUnraid, for example, is very popular because it allows you to mix disks of different sizes, add drives over time, and, above all, deploy Docker-based services with great ease, almost as if you had a personal App Store for your home server.
Thanks to these containerized applications, a NAS can, in practice, become your own Google Photos, but localYou can install photo library managers, indexers, facial and object recognition systems, timeline viewers, and more. The range of projects is enormous: Piwigo, Photonix, Chevereto, Damselfly, Lychee, Photoview, Photostructure, LibrePhotos, Nextcloud Photos with its Memories module, and several others.
Each one has its pros and cons. Some are very powerful at organizing, others excel at displaying photos, and still others try to closely mimic the feel of using Google Photos. One of the ones generating the most buzz is... Immich, an open-source platform designed specifically for those who want "all the good things about Google Photos, but without Google."
Immich and company: self-hosted alternatives to Google Photos
Immich has gained fame precisely because It closely replicates the Google Photos experience.: chronological timeline, favorites, albums, memories from "X years ago"... and, of course, mobile apps to automatically upload photos from your smartphone to your home server.
Its developers offer tools such as Immich CLI or Immich-Go for Import your entire Google Photos archive directly using Google TakeoutIn other words, you download your photos and videos from Google, transfer them to the NAS, and let Immich index them, generate thumbnails, and analyze faces and objects. With collections of over 100.000 photos and tens of thousands of videos, this process can take days, but in the end, you get a photo library that's entirely yours and without monthly fees.
In addition to the traditional search mode by filename or date, Immich features a semantic search engine based on machine learningYou can type concepts like "sea", "mountains" or even colors, and the system returns photos that match that description, much like Google Photos or Amazon Photos.
The desktop and mobile experience is quite polished: Keyboard shortcuts for marking favorites, deleting, or navigatingGood chronological organization, user and permission management, etc. The weak point, as with almost all current self-hosted solutions, is the integration with televisions: the apps for Android TV or Google TV tend to be more limited, with slow navigation and few management options from the remote.
Even so, for many advanced profiles, Immich or similar options are currently the only viable alternatives. the ideal balance between autonomy, power and costYou pay for the hardware once (NAS, disks) and then the electrical maintenance, but you don't depend on a company changing its mind about your storage plan.
Case study: combining cloud and local storage without going crazy
With all of the above on the table, the most sensible strategy for most people is not to choose between black or white, but combine cloud and local storage wiselySome practical ideas:
For average userFor someone who takes photos daily but not at a professional level, this approach might work:
- Use Google Photos or Amazon Photos only as a quick and convenient backup. from day to day.
- Make a “master” copy on a computer every so often (monthly, quarterly) organizing them neatly in folders.
- Save another copy to an external hard drive.Ideally, in another physical location in the house or at a relative's house.
- Limit endless 4K videos and prioritize shorter but meaningful recordings.
For those who generate tons of content Or if you're particularly concerned about privacy, it might make more sense:
- Setting up a NAS with multiple disks in RAID and a system like Unraid or TrueNAS.
- Install a manager like Immich, Photoprism or similar and automate uploading from your mobile device.
- Use Google Photos or similar services only as occasional support or to share albums with other people.
- Avoid exposing the NAS directly to the internet unless it is properly configured with secure tunnels (Tailscale, Cloudflare Tunnel, etc.).
In both profiles, the key idea is the same: Don't entrust your only copy of your memories to an external company or a single deviceThe cloud can change its conditions or become too small, and mobile phones, laptops, or hard drives can fail. Diversifying is tedious, yes, but it's what prevents tragedies.
It's about understanding that your photos and videos are much more than just files: they're your visual memory. That's why it's worth taking the time to define your own strategy instead of continuing to upload content "because everyone else is doing it" and, years later, discovering that It costs you a fortune to keep seeing the same old photosWith a little planning, you can continue to enjoy the convenience of Google Photos and the cloud, take advantage of services like Amazon Photos, and at the same time have your own local safe haven where your memories are protected from policy changes and endless subscriptions.
