There’s a shoebox in a lot of lofts. Curling prints, bad haircuts, somebody’s wedding. Nobody backed it up and nobody paid a subscription for it, and forty years later it’s still there.
Your photos aren’t in a shoebox any more. They’re in an account. That’s mostly better: you can search them, they survive a dropped phone, and they won’t get thrown out when a house is cleared. But be clear about what you gave up. The shoebox had one thing the account doesn’t. Nobody could close it.
What the subscription actually buys
Apple gives you 5GB free and then charges. In the UK that’s 99p a month for 50GB, £2.99 for 200GB and £8.99 for 2TB. Google gives you 15GB free, shared between Gmail, Drive and Photos. That’s why the “storage full” email usually comes because of your inbox, not your camera.
Those are fair prices. A couple of pounds a month to never think about it again is a good deal. Nobody is ripping you off.
But look at what you’re buying. It isn’t storage, it’s access. You pay for the right to keep reaching your own photos, on rules the company writes. And those rules change. Google Photos offered truly unlimited free storage for years, then announced it would stop on 1 June 2021. Everyone who had spent a decade relying on “unlimited” found out the word had an end date.
The bill isn’t the problem
The fee is the part you see, so it gets all the attention. The part to worry about is what the photos are tied to.
They aren’t a separate thing you bought. They sit inside one account that also holds your email, your contacts, your calendar, your login codes, the apps you’ve paid for and, for a lot of people, the phone number used to prove who you are. It’s one lock, with everything behind it.
What happens when the account stops opening
The everyday versions are dull, and much more common than the dramatic one. A card expires and the renewal quietly fails. Somebody runs out of storage and new photos simply stop being saved to the account. The phone mentions it once, in a notification nobody reads. A relative dies, and the family finds that the only person who could prove the account was theirs is the person who’s gone.
Then there’s the version that shows what the deal allows. In 2022, a father in the United States took photos of his toddler’s infection because a doctor asked for them before a video appointment. Google’s automatic scanning flagged the images, and his account was shut down two days later. Police investigated and found no crime. As the New York Times reported, he still hadn’t got his account back after being cleared, and with it went his email, his contacts and his phone number.
This is unlikely to happen to you. What matters is what the setup allows: a computer makes the decision, you appeal to the same company that made it, and nobody independent holds a copy for you.
And it isn’t only about being flagged. In February 2025 Apple withdrew Advanced Data Protection for UK users after a government demand, so its strongest privacy option stopped being available here. Apple said it was “gravely disappointed”. Nobody had done anything different. The rules had changed. The terms of your photo storage were rewritten in a conversation you weren’t part of.
Get a copy out: the bit to do today
Whatever you decide about the rest, do this part. It costs nothing and you can undo it.
If you’re on Google, use Google Takeout. Pick Google Photos on its own rather than your whole account, choose zip, and wait. Most people get the download link the same day, though a big library can take longer. Two things catch people out: the link runs out after about a week, and it only works a few times before you have to ask again.
If you’re on Apple, Apple runs a transfer service for iCloud Photos that takes three to seven days. Read its limits before you rely on it. Shared albums, smart albums, Live Photos and some photo details (such as dates and places) aren’t included. And note this one carefully: the service doesn’t work at all if you have Advanced Data Protection switched on.
Both tell you the same thing. There is a way out, which is good and better than it used to be. It’s also slower, narrower and loses more than reaching into a shoebox. If you want the fuller picture on getting your data back from a company that holds it, the guide to requesting your data under GDPR covers the legal route.
A folder of zip files in your Downloads isn’t a plan. It’s step one of four.
- 01get a copy outcosts nothing, can be undone, changes nothing. Do this part even if you stop here
- 02put it somewhere you owna drive, or software you run. Both are good answers
- 03make the second copythe step people skip, and the only one that can lose you everything
- 04then decide about the subscriptionlast, not first. Keeping it is a perfectly good answer
One drive is not enough. A single copy on a single disk in a single building is a worse setup than the one you left, however good your intentions. Three copies, two kinds of storage, one of them somewhere else.
Where to put it
An external drive is a real answer. It’s not fashionable, but if you copy the export onto a drive, and then onto a second drive kept at your mum’s house, you’re already better off than you were. No software, no server, no monthly fee.
If you want it to work like the service you left, that’s what self-hosted photo software is for. Self-hosted means software you run yourself. Your phone still uploads new photos on its own, you can still search by face and place, and you can still share albums with family. Immich is the one most people choose. It’s open source (anyone can see and run the code), and it’s being worked on heavily.
Take that last part plainly: this software changes quickly. It’s very good, it isn’t finished, and you’re the one who’ll be updating it.
If you want to see what self-hosted versions look like before you commit, the applications we run is a fair tour of the types.
The rule that matters more than any of this
This is how all of the above goes wrong. Somebody reads a post like this, cancels the subscription, copies fifteen years of photos onto one hard drive, and feels organised. Two years later the drive fails, because drives do, and the photos are gone. That could never have happened while a large company was quietly keeping several copies.
That isn’t taking control. It’s a worse setup with better intentions.
The people who build Immich put the rule at the top of their own project page, and it’s the only instruction in this post that isn’t optional:
Always follow 3-2-1 backup plan for your precious photos and videos!
Three copies of anything you care about. On two different kinds of storage. One of them somewhere else, in a different building, so a fire, a flood or a burglary can’t take the lot. Big providers do this for you without you seeing it, and it’s most of what you were really paying for. The day you take your photos back, you take that job back too.
In fairness to iCloud and Google Photos
They’re good products. The search works, sharing with family is easy, and the free tier has saved a huge number of photos that would otherwise have died with a phone. Most people should keep using something like them, and there’s no shame in that.
Self-hosting isn’t magic either. There are two honest limits.
Your own server can still see your photos. That’s not a flaw. It’s how face and object search works: something has to look at the picture to know there’s a dog in it. Running it yourself changes who decides, not whether the images can be seen. Being in charge of your photos isn’t the same as keeping them secret, and anyone who says otherwise is overselling.
It’s a computer, and now it’s yours. Nobody else notices when it stops. Nobody else installs the updates. If it breaks on a Sunday, it stays broken until you fix it.
That’s why the version that sticks, for most households, isn’t a clean break. It’s letting the phone keep saving to the account as it always has, and keeping your own copy too. Then the day the account stops opening is an annoyance, not a loss.
Where that leaves you
You don’t have to decide anything today. But the export costs nothing, takes a few minutes to request, and turns your whole photo history from something you can reach into something you have.
This is the practical half of a bigger question: where your data actually lives, and what happens when the service holding it closes. Photos are the right place to start, because they’re usually what people would be most upset to lose, and because you can be finished by Sunday.
Somebody in forty years will go looking for these. Put them somewhere that doesn’t need a password, a subscription and a company’s goodwill to open.