Moving your photos off iCloud and Google Photos
Your memories, on your own hard drive. What the subscription really buys, what happens when an account is locked, and how to get a copy of it all out.
There is 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 is still there.
Your photographs are not in a shoebox any more. They are in an account. That is mostly an improvement — they are searchable, they survive a dropped phone, and they are not going to be thrown out during a house clearance. But it is worth being clear-eyed about the swap, because the shoebox had one property the account does not: nobody could close it.
What the subscription actually buys
Apple gives you 5GB free and then charges — in the UK, 99p a month for 50GB, £2.99 for 200GB, £8.99 for 2TB. Google gives you 15GB free, shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos together, which is why the warning email usually arrives because of an inbox rather than a camera.
Those are fair prices. A couple of pounds a month to never think about it again is a good deal, and this is not an argument that you are being fleeced.
But notice what you are buying. Not storage — access. You are paying for the right to keep reaching your own photographs, on terms the other party writes. And those terms move. Google Photos offered genuinely unlimited free storage for years, and then announced it would stop on 1 June 2021. Everybody who had built a decade of habits on “unlimited” found out that the word had an expiry date on it.
The bill is not the problem
The fee is the visible part, so it gets all the attention. The part worth worrying about is what the photographs are attached to.
They are not a separate product you bought. They sit inside one account that also holds your email, your contacts, your calendar, your two-factor codes, the apps you have paid for, and for a lot of people the phone number that would be used to prove who you are. It is one lock, and everything is behind it.
What happens when the account stops opening
The ordinary versions are undramatic and far more common than the dramatic one. A card expires and the renewal quietly fails. Somebody hits the storage ceiling and new photographs simply stop being backed up — the phone says so once, in a notification, at the bottom of a busy screen. A relative dies and the family discovers that the person who could prove ownership was the person who is gone.
Then there is the version that shows what the arrangement permits. In 2022, a father in the United States photographed his toddler’s infection at a doctor’s request for a video appointment. Google’s automated scanning flagged the images, and his account was disabled two days later. Police investigated and concluded no offence had taken place. As the New York Times reported, his access was still not restored after he had been cleared — along with his email, his contacts and his phone number.
The point is not that this is likely to happen to you. It is not. The point is what the structure allows: a decision made by a system, appealed to the same company that made it, with no independent party holding a copy on your behalf.
And it is not only about being flagged. In February 2025 Apple withdrew Advanced Data Protection for UK users after a government demand, so its strongest option stopped being available here — Apple said it was “gravely disappointed”. Nobody’s behaviour had changed. The rules had. That is the whole thing in one example: the terms of your photo storage were rewritten by a conversation you were not part of.
Get a copy out — the bit to do today
Whatever you decide about the rest of this, do this part. It costs nothing and it is reversible.
If you are on Google, use Google Takeout. Select Google Photos on its own rather than exporting the whole account, choose zip, and wait. Most people get the link the same day, though a large library can take longer. Two things catch people out: the download link expires after about a week, and it can only be used a handful of times before you have to ask again.
If you are on Apple, Apple runs a transfer service for iCloud Photos that takes between three and seven days. Read its limits before you rely on it: shared albums, smart albums, Live Photos and some metadata are not included, and — this one is worth sitting with — the service does not work at all if you have Advanced Data Protection switched on.
Notice what both of those tell you. The exit exists, which is genuinely good and better than it used to be. It is also slower, narrower and lossier than putting your hand into a shoebox. If you want the fuller picture on prising data out of 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 is not a plan. It is step one of four.
- 01 get a copy out free, reversible, changes nothing — do this part even if you stop here
- 02 put it somewhere you own a drive, or software you run — both are legitimate answers
- 03 make the second copy the step people skip, and the only one that can lose you everything
- 04 then decide about the subscription last, not first — and keeping it is a perfectly good answer
One drive is not custody. A single copy on a single disk in a single building is a worse arrangement than the one you left, however much better the principles are. Three copies, two kinds of storage, one of them somewhere else.
Where to put it
An external drive is a real answer. Not a fashionable one, but if you copy the export onto a drive, and then onto a second drive kept at your mum’s house, you have already beaten the arrangement you started with. No software, no server, no monthly fee.
If you want it to behave like the thing you left, that is what self-hosted photo software is for — the phone still backs up automatically, faces and places still get searched, albums still get shared with family. Immich is the one most people land on. It is open source, anybody can run it, and it is under heavy active development.
That last phrase is doing real work, so take it plainly: this is software that changes quickly. It is very good and it is not finished, and you are the person who will be updating it.
If you want a sense of what the self-hosted versions of these things look like before committing to anything, the applications we run is a reasonable tour of the categories.
The rule that matters more than any of this
Here is the failure mode of everything above: somebody reads a post like this one, cancels the subscription, copies fifteen years of photographs onto a single hard drive, and feels organised. Two years later the drive fails, because that is what drives do, and the photographs are gone in a way they never could have been while a large company was quietly keeping several copies.
That is not custody. That is a worse arrangement with better principles.
The people who build Immich put the rule at the top of their own project page, and it is the only instruction in this entire post that is not 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 — a different building, so that a fire, a flood or a burglary cannot take the lot. Big providers do this for you invisibly, and it is most of what you were actually paying for. The day you take the photographs back, you take that job back too.
Being fair about it
iCloud and Google Photos are good products. The search genuinely works, sharing with family is effortless, and the free tier has rescued an enormous number of photographs that would otherwise have died with a phone. Most people should keep using something like them, and there is no shame in that at all.
Self-hosting is also not magic, and two honest limits are worth naming.
Your own server can still read your photographs. That is not a flaw, it is how face and object search works — something has to look at the picture to know there is a dog in it. Running it yourself changes who decides, not whether the images can be read. Custody is not secrecy, and anybody selling you the second thing is overselling.
It is a computer, and it is now yours. Nobody else notices when it stops. Nobody else applies the update. If it breaks on a Sunday it stays broken until you deal with it.
Which is why the version of this that actually sticks, for most households, is not a clean break. It is keeping the phone backing up as it always has, and holding your own copy as well — so that the day the account stops opening is an annoyance rather than a bereavement.
Where that leaves you
You do not have to decide anything today. But the export is free, it takes a few minutes to request, and it converts your entire photographic 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. Photographs are the right place to start, because they are usually the thing people would be most upset to lose, and because you can be finished by Sunday.
Somebody in forty years is going to go looking for these. Put them somewhere that does not need a password, a subscription and a company’s continued goodwill to open.