Photo Backup Storage Calculator

Why your phone's photo library quietly outgrows free cloud storage

Your phone is the best camera you have ever owned — which is exactly the problem. You shoot more than you realize: a dozen photos of the kids' birthday, burst shots of the dog, screenshots of recipes you will never cook. Every major cloud service hands you a modest free tier — Google's well-known 15 GB is the classic example — and for a while it feels generous. Then one morning your phone tells you backups have paused because your storage is full, and you are left wondering where it all went.

The answer is simple: small files add up relentlessly. A few photos a day does not sound like much, but multiplied across a year it becomes gigabytes, and gigabytes quietly turn into a paid plan. Most people only think about photo storage the day the free tier runs out — which is the most expensive day to start thinking about it.

How the estimate works — average phone photo and video sizes

The math behind this calculator is straightforward: photos per month × average photo size × 12 gives your yearly photo storage; do the same for videos; add the two together.

The trick is the "average size" part. A JPEG photo from a modern phone usually lands between 3 and 6 MB. iPhones default to HEIF, a more efficient format that typically squeezes the same photo into 2–3 MB. RAW photos — the unprocessed files enthusiasts love — can exceed 20 MB each. Video is hungrier still: a minute of 4K footage can run 200–400 MB, which is why even a handful of clips a month can dwarf your entire photo collection.

For the most accurate estimate, check a few real files on your phone and use those numbers as your averages. The calculator above does the multiplication for you — including the fiddly MB-to-GB conversion (1 GB = 1024 MB).

A worked example — 300 photos and 10 videos a month

Say you take 300 photos a month at 5 MB each. That is 300 × 5 ÷ 1024 ≈ 1.46 GB per month from photos. Add 10 videos a month at 200 MB each: 10 × 200 ÷ 1024 ≈ 1.95 GB per month from videos. Combined, you generate about 3.4 GB every month.

Multiply by 12 and you need roughly 41 GB per year. The free 15 GB tier covers barely four months of that habit, so it is out. The next tier — 100 GB — fits comfortably, which is why the calculator names it the cheapest fitting plan. At this pace the 100 GB plan would fill up in about 29 months, giving you more than two years of headroom before you need to think about it again.

Practical tips to keep your plan small

Before paying for a bigger plan, shrink the pile. Enable HEIF or HEVC capture in your camera settings — the quality is visually identical for most people and files are roughly half the size. Once a year, go through duplicates, burst shots, and screenshots; these are often 20–30% of a library and the easiest gigabytes you will ever reclaim. Archive finished years to an external drive or a second cloud bucket so your live plan only carries the current year. Finally, actually compare the tiers: the jump from a free 15 GB to a paid 100 GB plan is usually the sweet spot for families, while 2 TB is overkill unless you are hoarding 4K video. Run your own numbers above and let the math pick the cheapest plan that fits.