Two ladders, and the choice between them matters more than the size you pick.
Personal or shared#
A personal plan is your own storage for your own albums.
A Family Hub plan is one allowance a household shares — everyone adds, everyone reaches the same archive, one person pays.
If more than one person in your home takes photographs worth keeping, the hub is almost always the right answer. It's one subscription instead of several, and it stops the archive depending on one person's account.
How much space#
Hard to guess in advance, and easy to change later, so don't agonise.
Rough shape: photographs are small, video is not. A few minutes of video can outweigh hundreds of photographs, so a family that films things needs several times what a family that photographs things does.
The practical approach is to start where you think you are and move up when the storage screen says you're close. Changing plan disturbs nothing.
The one decision that isn't about space#
500 GB is where two things unlock, on personal and hub plans alike:
- Print-ready originals — the untouched camera file kept alongside the browsable copy, for photos.
- Describe-it search — finding a photo by saying what's in it.
The first is the one to think about, because it's the only decision here that's one-way: a photo uploaded on a smaller plan never had its original stored, and upgrading later can't recover it.
If you might want to print things large in ten years, that argues for reaching the line before you upload years of photographs rather than after. If you mostly want your family to see each other's pictures, it doesn't matter and you should buy the space you need.
Yearly is cheaper#
Paying annually works out at the equivalent of two months free, on every paid plan.
Changing plan#
Up or down, at any time. Your albums, photos, members and permissions are untouched — only the allowance changes, and on the larger plans some capabilities switch on.
Moving down below what you're using makes the account read-only rather than deleting anything. See If a payment fails.
Current prices#
On the pricing page. They're deliberately not repeated here — a help page that restates prices is a help page that's wrong the first time they change.