Google Photos Storage: What Shares With Drive

Google Photos, Google Drive, and Gmail don't each get their own 15 GB. They all draw from the same single pool. If your photos have grown to fill 10 GB, that's 10 GB taken directly from what your Drive files and emails can use. Most people don't realize this until a storage warning appears when they've uploaded very little to Drive directly.

Here's how Google Photos uses that shared storage — including the 2021 policy change that removed what used to be unlimited photo backup for most users.

The Shared 15 GB Pool

Every Google Account includes 15 GB of free storage, distributed across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos combined. There's no way to allocate more to one service at the expense of another — the three services share a single bucket, and whatever one uses is unavailable to the others.

Buying more storage through Google One expands that shared pool. A 100 GB Google One plan gives you 100 GB total across all three services, not 100 GB each.

What Google Photos Counts Against Your Storage

Not all photos in Google Photos count the same way, and the rules changed significantly in June 2021.

Before June 1, 2021: Photos backed up in "High quality" (now called "Storage saver") did not count toward your storage quota at all. Google offered unlimited storage for compressed photos and videos under this setting. Many users accumulated years of photos without touching their storage limit because of this.

After June 1, 2021: All new photos and videos uploaded to Google Photos count toward your quota, regardless of which backup quality setting you use. The only exception is photos that were already backed up in High quality before that date — those remain free.

In practical terms: if you've been using Google Photos for years, your older photos may not be taking up storage, but everything added after mid-2021 is. If you switched to Google Photos recently, everything you've uploaded counts.

Storage Saver vs. Original Quality Today

Google Photos still offers two backup quality settings, and they do still affect how much storage your photos use — just not whether they count.

Storage saver (formerly High quality) compresses photos slightly and caps videos at 1080p. A compressed photo typically takes 3–5 MB instead of 10–20 MB for a high-resolution original. For most people, the visual difference is unnoticeable.

Original quality stores photos and videos at their full resolution with no compression. DSLR shots, RAW files, and 4K videos can run into tens of megabytes or gigabytes per file. If you shoot on a high-end camera or use your phone's maximum resolution, this setting consumes storage significantly faster.

Switching from Original to Storage saver won't reduce existing photos already stored — it only affects new uploads. Google does offer a one-time conversion to Storage saver for previously uploaded originals, accessible from the Google Photos settings under "Manage storage."

What Doesn't Count in Google Photos

A few categories are excluded from your storage quota.

Photos shared with you in shared albums don't count against your storage. Only the owner of the original photo bears the storage cost. If someone shares a large album with you and you save photos from it, those saved copies do count.

Certain Pixel phone models include free Google Photos storage as a hardware perk. Pixel 1 through Pixel 5 owners received unlimited free Original quality storage for photos taken on those phones. Pixel 6 and later receive free unlimited Storage saver uploads for photos taken on-device.

How Google Photos and Google Drive Relate to Each Other

Google Photos and Google Drive are separate products, but they overlap in one area: photos and videos stored in Drive don't automatically appear in Google Photos, and vice versa (since 2019, when Google separated them).

If you store photos in Drive folders, they're counted in your Drive storage quota. If those same photos are backed up in Google Photos separately, they're counted twice — once for Drive, once for Photos. Duplicate storage like this is one of the less obvious ways a storage quota fills up faster than expected.

If you're trying to understand where all your storage is going across Drive and Photos, Overdrive can show you a complete breakdown of your Drive storage by file type and size — useful for identifying large media files that may be duplicated between services.

When Photos Becomes the Dominant Storage User

For most active smartphone users who've been on Google Photos since before 2021 and haven't checked their settings since, Photos is likely their largest storage consumer. Years of backup in Original quality, or post-2021 backups in either setting, add up quickly.

A useful starting point is visiting photos.google.com/settings and checking the storage estimate there, which shows how long your current Google One plan will last at your current upload rate. That estimate is often sobering.