Google Photos Storage Cost Calculator

What actually fills your 15 GB (and it isn't what you think)

The free 15 GB is not 15 GB of photos. It is one shared pool split between Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos, which is why people who have never once opened Drive still run out of room. A crowded Gmail account, attachments and spam included, can take most of the quota before you back up a single picture.

Here are the numbers the calculator runs on, and the reason video wins every argument: about 4,000 original-quality HEIC photos come to roughly 10 GB, and a single hour of 4K video comes to roughly the same 10 GB by itself. A typical 8,000-photo library is around 20 GB before you count video, Gmail or Drive, which is already past the free tier.

Google One plans and prices in 2026, and the one they have hidden

Google Photos is free. Storage costs money, and Google One is how you buy it. Annual billing saves about 16% against paying monthly: a year of 2 TB is $119.88 month by month against $99.99 paid up front, so $19.89 stays in your pocket for buying the same plan a different way.

The 200 GB plan is the interesting one. It is still there at $2.99 a month, but since 2024 Google has stopped surfacing it in the default signup flow, which now leads with the 100 GB Basic tier and the AI-bundled 2 TB and 5 TB tiers. Existing subscribers keep it, and you can usually still reach it from the manage-plan screen after subscribing to something else. For a phone-sized photo library it is the best-value step up, so it stays in our table.

Watch the larger tiers: they now come bundled with Gemini features. If all you want is somewhere to put photos, you may be paying for AI you never open. US prices, pre-tax, and they vary by country. Anything above 5 TB is business territory, and that is a conversation with Google.

Cheaper than upgrading: the cleanup maths

Most libraries are 20 to 40% dead weight. Duplicates. Three near-identical shots of the same plate of food. Screenshots of things you sorted out months ago, burst sequences nobody culled, clips you have not rewatched once. That is not a moral failing, it is what happens when a camera lives in your pocket.

The useful bit: you do not have to delete everything, only enough to cross back under a ceiling. Dropping from 2 TB to 200 GB saves $70 a year, and it saves it again next year. Getting under 15 GB saves $19.99 a year and puts you back on free. The calculator above shows exactly how many GB stand between you and the tier below. One caveat: Google Photos keeps deleted items in the trash for 60 days and they keep counting against your quota the whole time, so empty the trash when you are done.

The real bottleneck is not the deleting, it is the deciding. Thousands of photos, one at a time, is where every cleanup dies. That is the job Swipe44 exists to do: swipe right to keep, left to delete, working through Recents, Random, or one month at a time, with the file size printed on every card so you can see what is actually costing you. Duplicates get grouped on-device by perceptual hashing, so you review them side by side instead of hunting for them. Everything you mark collects in a pending pile, then the whole batch goes at once behind a single system confirmation, and the app tells you how much space came back. Nothing is uploaded, and iCloud originals are never downloaded.

Cleaning an Android phone instead? Our guide to mass deleting photos on Android covers the fastest routes through the built-in tools.

Google One vs iCloud+ vs paying nothing

The two big phone clouds price differently at the bottom and identically in the middle. Apple starts cheaper (50 GB for $0.99) but gives you only 5 GB free. Google gives you 15 GB free, then its smallest paid plan jumps to 100 GB. At 200 GB the two cost the same, and Google is the only one of the pair that discounts for annual billing.

On an iPhone, run the numbers on the iCloud storage cost calculator instead, which also folds in device backups. Either way, there is a third option that costs nothing: clean the library and stay under the ceiling you already have.

How this calculator estimates your usage

• Photos: photo count times MB per photo, divided by 1,024.
• Video: minutes times MB per minute, divided by 1,024. Storage saver forces 1080p, so video is priced at 60 MB per minute regardless of what you shot.
• Gmail + Drive: taken as given, because it comes out of the same 15 GB.
• Recommended plan: the smallest Google One plan whose capacity covers the total.
• Months until you run out: headroom divided by monthly growth, floored. Growth is your new photos per month, plus video pro-rata at your current photo-to-video ratio.
• Cleanup savings: the annual price gap between your plan and the one below it, paired with the GB you would need to clear to get there.

Treat the output as an estimate, roughly 20% either way. Real libraries are mixed format, and compression depends on what is in the frame: a photo of a blank wall is far smaller than a photo of a forest. One MB-per-photo constant is a model, not a measurement. For your real number, open one.google.com/storage, which breaks the 15 GB down by Photos, Gmail and Drive.