Keepr One rule covers most of this: the album decides.
Where the album lives is what matters#
- A photo in a Family Hub album uses the hub's shared allowance, whoever uploaded it.
- A photo in a personal album uses that person's own allowance.
So someone on a free personal account can add photos to a large hub all day without touching their own 5 GB. And a member of a large hub still uses their own storage for their own personal albums.
Photos other people add to your personal album#
Use their storage, not yours. If you invite someone to contribute to your album and they add fifty videos, that's their allowance being spent.
Ownership and storage travel together — which is also why taking ownership of photos takes on their storage cost.
Sharing doesn't duplicate anything#
Sharing an album with three circles doesn't store it three times. There's one album, stored once, shown to more people. Sharing has no storage cost at all.
What counts towards your total#
Both copies of a photo, where both exist:
- The browsable copy — what you and everyone else look at.
- The original file, on plans that keep print-ready originals.
The original is typically several times larger, which is why plans that keep them are the larger plans — and why removing originals you've finished with frees so much while keeping every photo.
What usually fills a plan#
Video. A few minutes of it can outweigh hundreds of photographs. If storage is disappearing faster than seems reasonable, videos are almost always the answer.
After that, originals. Then duplicate stacks — which don't save space, they only tidy the view. Every near-identical shot in a stack is still a stored file.
Keepr tries to stop those accumulating at the source. When you pick photos to upload, it checks them against what you've already got and flags anything that looks like a repeat, before a byte moves. It's a warning rather than a blocker — you decide what to skip, and you can upload the lot anyway. See duplicate stacks for what it can and can't recognise.
When a plan is described in photos and videos#
Plan sizes are gigabytes, and the gigabytes are the real limit. Where a plan is also described as a number of photos or videos, that is an estimate at an average of about 1 MB for a photo and about 35 MB for a video, so what you actually fit depends on what you upload.
It is a ceiling rather than a promise, and video is what moves it most: the same plan holds far fewer videos than photos.
Seeing where it went#
Profile → Storage. It shows one card for each allowance you're part of: your own plan first, then every Family Hub you belong to. They're kept apart on purpose — a hub's gigabytes aren't yours, deleting from a hub frees nothing in your plan, and only whoever pays for a hub can make it bigger.
Your own card breaks the usage into four parts that add up to the total:
- Videos and Photos — the optimised copies, which is your library.
- Print-ready originals — the full-size files, on plans that keep them.
- Duplicates — every extra copy sitting in a stack.
Under that you'll find how much you could free without losing a single photograph, and how much you added over the last 30 days. That last figure is the useful one: a percentage tells you how full you are, a rate tells you whether you need to do anything about it.
Each hub gets the same card, plus who is using it — every member's share, visible to everyone in the hub, not just admins. That turns "we're out of space" into a conversation rather than a mystery.
Two things read differently on a hub card, on purpose. "You can free up X" counts only what you added, because a hub's photos belong to whoever put them there and only that person can remove them. And there's no "full in about N years" estimate — with several people adding, one holiday makes any projection wrong.
Two things worth trying before moving up a plan:
- Remove originals you no longer need.
- Review duplicate stacks.
Most libraries have more room available than their owners expect.