Google is including Google Photos, with almost every Android phone nowadays. It’s difficult to say no to it, with it coming as mostly the default gallery for most smartphones. It has a lot of attractive features to it, such as entirely free Cloud photo storage that won’t eat into your Google Drive space. You can access these photos from anywhere — even on iOS devices. The unfortunate part is that the goal of Google Photos is to get photos off your phone locally, and put in the Cloud. By doing this, you won’t necessarily have quick access to your photos and videos, especially if you ever lose an Internet connection.
That said, you might want to look at other means for storing your favorite photos and videos. If you follow along below, we’ll show you the best options available.
Prime Photos
Prime Photos operates reasonably similar to how Google Photos works but focuses on providing benefits for Amazon Prime users. If you’re a Prime subscriber, you get free, unlimited photo storage, whereas it’s limited as far as a free account goes. You can store all of your favorite photos and videos online with Prime Photos, and then when they’re all backed up, you can remove them from your device. Prime Photos makes it easy to share photos and videos with others, too. If you subscribe with Amazon Prime, you can give five other Prime Photos users unlimited storage as well, so long as you keep your subscription. Prime Photos has excellent syncing features as well — download Prime Photos on any device, log into your account, and you’ll have instant access.
Download it now: Google Play
Piktures
Piktures focuses on being the modern gallery for your smartphone. You get a stunning gallery that meshes all of your photos and videos seamlessly together. This rich gallery can be accessed through and uploaded to Dropbox, Google Drive, and even OneDrive. There’s even an option to store more private photos (maybe photos of your children) in a Secret Drive that is password locked.
You can easily share photos with Piktures, even straight to social media. They have a couple of nice views for organizing content as well, including a Albums and Location view. You can use Piktures for free at the link below.
Download it now: Google Play
Flickr
If you haven’t heard of Flickr before, you’ve probably been living under a rock. Flickr is run by Yahoo and has been around for a long time. It was just recently updated to meet modern standards, and now has a lot of features that are akin to Google Photos. They give you 1000GB of free data to store your photos and videos in the Cloud — you can remove them from your local storage if you so choose after this. On top of that, Flickr has a full photo and video editing suite so that you can crop, add filters, and tweak photos in different ways straight from the app. Your first 1000GB is free to use, but after that, you can purchase more storage.
Download it now: Google Play
QuickPic
QuickPic is another excellent option, even featuring Google Drive support. It boasts over ten million downloads, and it’s light and fast to use. It follows Google’s Material Design standards, and you can easily upload it to your Google Drive space. You can access thousands of photos with the tap of a button, and you can keep secure photos private with a secure folder that is protected with a PIN code.
Download it now: Google Play
A+ Gallery
A+ Gallery might be last on our list, but it’s still a decent alternative to Google Photos and other Cloud-based gallery apps. They copy the Google Photos design in a lot of ways, which makes the app easy to navigate and use. You can easily organize your photos, and you can even browse them by location and where you’ve taken them. You can easily lock down private photos, and you can change the overall theme of the A+ gallery to make it look a little nicer. Check it out for yourself at the link below.
Download it now: Google Play
Verdict
As you can see, there are a lot of excellent Google Photos alternatives on the market. Our favorite is easily Piktures or Prime Photos. Both are free to use, though subscribing and paying for premium features can give you a leg up with these Gallery apps.