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Your phone photos: how to actually keep them without paying every month

Storage is full and the warning keeps coming back. Before paying, work out how much space you really need: the answer often costs less than what you are being offered.

For Humans Staff · · 4 min read

Tech for Humans
Level
principiante
Time
30 minutes the first time
What you need
Your phone, plus an external drive if you take the third road

The warning always arrives at the wrong moment: you are about to take a photo and the phone says storage is full. What follows is always the same offer, a few euros a month, and often that is the right choice. But first it is worth knowing how many photos you actually have, because the figure changes a lot.

In plain words

Cloud: computers owned by Google or Apple where your photos stay safe even if your phone breaks. GB (gigabyte): the unit storage is measured in. A modern smartphone photo weighs between 2 and 5 MB, and a thousand MB make a GB: in practice one GB holds between 200 and 500 photos.

First: how many photos do you actually have

Before deciding anything, look at the number. It takes ten seconds and it changes everything.

  1. On Android: open Google Photos, tap your picture at the top right, then Storage. You will see how much photos and videos take up, separately.
  2. On iPhone: Settings > General > iPhone Storage. Wait a few seconds for the chart to load, then look at the Photos row.

From here the choice depends on the number you just read. Under 15 GB you do not need to pay anything. Between 15 and 200 GB the small subscription is almost always right. Above 200 GB, or if you have a lot of video, the third road is worth a look.

Road 1: clean up, and the free space is enough

Google gives you 15 GB, Apple 5 GB. It sounds like little, but most of what fills it is not the photos you care about: it is duplicates, screenshots, WhatsApp videos somebody forwarded you.

  1. In Google Photos open the Library tab, then Utilities: you will find clean-up suggestions, with large videos and blurry shots already grouped. Delete what it shows you in bulk.
  2. On iPhone go to Photos > Albums > Recents, then Albums > Media Types > Videos: they are what eats the space, not the photos.
  3. Clear the WhatsApp folder: in your gallery look for the WhatsApp Images and WhatsApp Video albums. Those are not your photos, they are the ones people sent you.
  4. Empty the gallery's bin: deleted photos stay there for thirty days and keep taking up space.

If you are under the free limit after the clean-up, you are done. That is the case for more people than you would expect.

Road 2: the small subscription, and that’s that

If you have a lot of photos and you care about them, a 100 GB plan costs around 2 euros a month from both Google and Apple, and you can cancel whenever you like without losing anything (the photos stay, it simply stops adding new ones until you are back under the limit).

Two euros a month never to lose a photo again is money well spent, and that deserves saying plainly. The thing to check is that the plan is the family-shared one: both providers let you split the storage between several people, and households often pay for two or three subscriptions where one would do.

Relax:

Cancelling does not delete your photos. If you stop paying, the service goes read-only: you can still see and download everything, it just stops uploading new material until you free up space. Photos are only deleted after a long time and several warnings.

Road 3: the copy at home, with no monthly cost

This is the road for people with a lot of video, or who do not want subscriptions. A 1 TB external drive costs about fifty euros once and holds tens of thousands of photos.

  1. Connect the phone to the computer with the cable. On Android, when the notification appears, choose File transfer; on iPhone, allow access when the phone asks.
  2. Open the phone's folder from the computer and copy the DCIM folder onto the external drive. That is where every photo taken with the camera lives.
  3. Check the copy really arrived: open a few photos from the external drive, not just the folder listing.
  4. Only then delete the photos from the phone.

There is an important catch, and it is why this road is not for everyone: one copy is not a backup. If the external drive is dropped or fails, and the photos were only there, they are gone. The professional rule is to keep two copies in two different places. The compromise that works for most people is the small cloud plan for photos, plus a yearly copy onto the external drive for videos.

The verdict

Look at how many GB you use before deciding. Under 15 GB, a clean-up is enough. Between 15 and 200, the 2-euro family-shared plan is the simplest answer and you never think about it again. Above that, or with a lot of video, cloud for photos and an external drive for videos. The only wrong choice is having none of them: photos are lost forever in an instant, and no support desk can bring them back.

Photos are only one part. If your phone breaks you also want your contacts, chats and apps back as you left them: that is the phone backup, a different thing you switch on once. And if the problem is more general, we wrote how to free up space without deleting your photos.

Sources

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