Benefits include the ability to share data with family members, priority customer support, and discounts on items purchased from the Google Store (3% for the 200GB plan and 10% for the 2TB plan). The 2TB plan will set you back only $9.99 (or $99.99 for the year). 200GB costs only fractionally more at $2.99 a month, or $29.99 a year. The 100GB plan costs $1.99 a month, or $11.99 a year.

There are three plans providing 100GB, 200GB, and 2TB of data respectively, and for each, paying annually saves you 16% If you need more Google Cloud storage (opens in new tab), you can sign up for a Google One (opens in new tab) subscription. Original quality photos and videos do count against your 15GB limit, and remember that this limit is shared among all Google services, from Photos to Drive and Gmail. Keep in mind that you can back up RAW image files, but check Google’s support documentation (opens in new tab) to see what types of RAW files are supported. In that case, select original quality, which will upload the full-size image. If you’re shooting with a DSLR or thinking about printing photos, though, you might not want any compression. Note that Photos also accepts videos, and high quality uploads are stored in 1080p, which is already the maximum resolution at which many cameras are capable of recording. They don’t count towards the 15GB of free cloud storage you get with a Google account, so you can store as many images as you want. The advantage is that these backups are completely free.

Google’s compression is very efficient, especially for JPG image files. If you’re uploading from a smartphone, you likely won’t notice any drop in image quality. When you select high quality backup, Google will compress images slightly before transferring them. Google One offers a range of pricing plans for different storage levels (Image credit: Google)īefore you start backing up images to Google Photos, it’s important to understand the difference between high and original quality backups.

Google photos backup and sync