at any given time google could decide to do away with the google photos, or charge for storage space, which would mean you are stuck downloading all of your photos onto at home storage systems.

You also cannot depend on your photos always being on google, as a lot of people depended on myspace years ago to host their music, and myspace lost it all. Portable hard drives are a cheap option to get you started out and keeping the highest quality of your files as you can, until you decide to make the leap, 4tb of storage is around $120 and will last you long enough to make a decision. that's why a NAS is the best option, with a secondary backup store offsite, say in a lockbox at a post office or bank.Īgain you could always get yourself a google photos account to store some decent quality jpegs as a 'just in case' option' but I would not suggest that to store your main library.Īnother thing to think about is the bandwidth limitation google will place on large uploads or downloads, which will take quite a bit of time. Storage is constantly getting cheaper, but cloud storage is still not really an option for any serious photographer, and a lot of companies that you pay for 'unlimited storage' or 'all the storage you need' have limits on photographers using their cloud storage for large library backups.

a great saying in life is 'you get what you pay for' and free is the bottom of the barrel. However if you do continue with your photography, and start to learn more, produce better images, and want to do more, and have full raw files, or even true HQ jpegs, google photos isn't going to cut it, and you may regret going the free route. A NAS is a great option for in home storage, and having an offsite backup, (not in the cloud) is also recommended but there is nothing wrong with the cloud as a 3rd backup.ĭepending on what camera you shoot with, and if you shoot in JPEG, free google photos may be a good option for you.

Adobe lightroom cc 2015 google drive