Where Should You Store Your Pet’s Photos? An Exit Test, With Lessons From Snapchat, LINE and Google Photos

Keep your pet’s original photos somewhere you can leave, and keep a second copy you control. A good home lets you export everything, in standard files, for free, at any time and on any plan. The second copy can be an external drive or a folder in a general cloud drive. Messaging-app albums and social apps are fine for showing photos to family, but they shouldn’t hold the only copy.

The reason is time. A dog’s or cat’s photos pile up over many years, and the terms of a photo service can change well within that span. Google Photos started counting new uploads toward a free 15 GB in 2021. Snapchat introduced paid storage for Memories above 5GB in 2025.

This post goes through what changed at those services, what LINE does with album photos, two apps that announced their end, and a five-question test you can apply to any service, ours included.

What happened to free photo storage?

Google Photos in 2021 and Snapchat in 2025 both put limits on free storage. In November 2020, Google announced it was changing Google Photos’ unlimited High quality storage policy: starting June 1, 2021, new photos and videos count toward the free 15 GB that comes with every Google Account. Photos and videos uploaded in High quality before that date don’t count toward it.

Google gave more than six months’ notice. Still, the change shows the pattern that matters for a pet’s archive: the service sets the price of keeping your photos, and it can change that price after you have moved years of them in.

Here is what changed, or what to know, at each service in this post:

What is the Snapchat “memory tax”?

“Memory tax” is what some users called Snapchat’s Memories Storage Plans, announced on September 26, 2025. Snapchat launched Memories in 2016, and by its own count people have saved more than 1 trillion of them.

Here is what Snapchat says changed:

• Memories up to 5GB stay free.
• Above that, there are paid storage plans. In the U.S., 100GB costs $1.99 a month or $20 a year.
• Memories over the 5GB limit get 12 months of temporary storage.
• Snapchat won’t automatically delete your Memories because you don’t upgrade.
• Starting in January 2027, Memories that are more than a year old and aren’t part of your oldest 5GB are archived. They show up as thumbnails, and you need to upgrade to open, edit or share them.
• You can still download your Memories to your device.

The reaction was loud. On October 8, 2025, TalkAndroid reported that users were “calling it everything from a memory tax to corporate greed.”

The lesson isn’t that Snapchat is a bad place for photos. It’s that any service holding your only copy can change what access costs, after the fact. Snapchat left the door open, though: you can still take your Memories out. That door is the first thing to check at any service.

What does LINE do to photos and videos in albums?

In LINE albums, original quality and videos are for paying members. If your family chats on LINE, its albums feel like a natural home for pet photos, so it helps to know three rules from LINE’s own help pages before an album becomes the only copy.

Original quality is for members. LINE’s Help Center says original-quality photos in albums are available only to LYP Premium members and to subscribers on the LINE MUSIC with LYP Premium Enjoy plan. Without a membership, the album doesn’t hold your photos at original quality.

Videos last as long as the membership. Only members can upload videos to an album. If you cancel LYP Premium, LINE says that 30 days after the membership’s expiry date, the videos you saved as a member are removed from the album, and the other people in the chat can’t see them either. Original-quality photos are converted to standard quality.

Photos sent in a chat expire. Images and videos sent in a chat, outside an album, are kept on LINE’s servers only for a limited time. After that they can’t be viewed, and LINE doesn’t say how long the period is.

You can save a whole album in one go: open the album from the chat’s menu, tap the menu in the top-right corner, and choose to download the album. It works one album at a time, so a family with many albums has some tapping to do.

None of this is hidden; it’s all in the help pages. But few people reread help pages while uploading a puppy video.

Can a photo app really disappear?

Yes. When a service closes, what you keep depends on how much notice you get and whether there is a way to take everything out.

wellnote, a Japanese family app built around sharing children’s photos with relatives, announced on November 30, 2022 that it would end on December 27, less than a month later. INTERNET Watch reported at the time that there was no bulk download and that users were criticizing the decision.

By December 8, ITmedia NEWS reported that the final shutdown had been moved to April 11, 2023, and that a bulk download would be offered: requested from January 5 to January 31, 2023, through wellnote’s web version for PCs. According to ITmedia, the bulk download came about at the offer of another company, MIXI.

Pettoru (ぺっとる), a Japanese photo album app made for pets, announced that it would end at the end of June 2026. The notice from its operator, Biophilia, says that after that, access to the app and to photo data is shut off in stages. It gives no steps for saving photos.

You can’t remove this risk: servers cost money every month. What you can do is decide in advance how exposed you are. A family that already has its own copy can read a shutdown notice calmly.

How do you judge where to keep your photos?

Ask one question: if I decided to leave today, what would I lose? Five checks answer it.

1. Can you export everything at once, photos, videos and records, not one file at a time?
2. Is export free, on every plan, including after you cancel?
3. Are the files standard (JPEG, MP4, records as a table or JSON) so the archive is useful anywhere?
4. Do you know what comes back? Check the photo quality and where the dates and comments end up. If you don’t get your originals back, keep the originals somewhere else too.
5. Is it a published policy, or just how things work today?

A service that passes all five can’t hold your memories hostage, so it has to keep you by being good rather than by being hard to leave. A service that fails may still be fine to use. Treat it as a place to look at photos, not as the only home of the archive.

What to do this weekend (whatever service you use)

• Find your originals. If your best photos exist only inside a messaging app’s albums, export them now, while things are calm. The steps are in how to export your pet photos.
• Keep two homes for photos you can’t replace: the service you use every day, plus a plain backup, such as an external drive or a folder in a general cloud drive.
• Do one export a year. An anniversary makes a good reminder, and your pet’s gotcha day works well. An export you have actually tried is the only one you can count on.
• Reread one paragraph of the terms: the one about what happens when you stop paying. It’s usually short.
• Separate showing from storing. If photos end up in a chat app because it’s the only app the grandparents use, a link that opens in their browser can do the showing. See how to share pet photos with grandparents without an app.
• Tell one other adult in the family where the archive lives. If only one person knows where the originals are and how to reach them, the family’s photos depend on one login. Five minutes fixes it.

Where Memofu stands

Memofu is a private app for your pet’s photos and health log, shared with family, and we put it through the same test. Its exit door is a policy, not a feature: full export of photos, videos, posts and health records is free on every plan, forever. Cancelling Premium doesn’t delete your memories, and export stays free. Storage of existing memories is never capped.

Our answer to question one: one tap builds the whole export, but it isn’t a single archive file. The export has a page that lists every photo and video by month and day, each with its own download link, plus a JSON file with your posts, comments and health records. Saving the photos and videos is still one item at a time.

Here is our answer to question four. Photos are stored as JPEGs up to 2048px on the long edge, and videos are kept as uploaded. Exported photos don’t carry their date inside the file: the date goes in the file name and in the JSON file. Download links in an export last 7 days, and a fresh export is always free. Keep the originals from your camera in a second home too.

Our pricing page lists what we won’t charge for, right beside what we sell, and the features page covers the rest.

Hold us to the same standard you hold everyone else to.

Sources

• Updating Google Photos’ storage policy to build for the future — Google, November 11, 2020
• How to download your Google data — Google Photos Help, checked September 2026
• Introducing Memories Storage Plans — Snap Newsroom, September 26, 2025
• How do I manage my Memories storage? and How do I download my data from Snapchat? — Snapchat Support, checked September 2026
• Snapchat Is Finally Charging For Memories, And Here’s What You Should Know — TalkAndroid, October 8, 2025
• アルバムの作り方⋅編集と、アルバム内の写真⋅動画を共有⋅転送する方法 (albums), LYPプレミアムを解約するには？ (cancelling LYP Premium) and 画像⋅動画⋅ボイスメッセージを送信⋅受信⋅再生できない (images and videos in chats) — LINE Help Center, in Japanese, checked September 2026
• サービス終了の家族SNS「wellnote」、1カ月後にデータ全削除も一括DL機能なく批判殺到 — INTERNET Watch, December 6, 2022, in Japanese
• 突如終了で批判受けた家族SNS「ウェルノート」、一括ダウンロード提供へ 「みてね」移行も — ITmedia NEWS, December 8, 2022, in Japanese
• 可愛いペットのフォトアルバムアプリ「ぺっとる」がアンドロイドに対応しました — Biophilia, via PR TIMES, July 22, 2021, in Japanese
• アルバムアプリ「ぺっとる」サービス終了のお知らせ — Biophilia (page dated April 1, 2026), in Japanese