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But in 2016 Snapchat introduced Memories, which is a way to save Snaps you create to your own personal cloud storage, for viewing or reuse later. Snap said that “the vast majority” of users currently have less than 5GB of Memories stored, and so will not need to pay anything.
But the change in monetisation is likely to hit the app’s most ardent users, overwhelmingly teens and young adults.
What are users saying
Some users reacting to the change online said they had been using Memories as free cloud storage, to avoid taking up precious space on their phones or paying for storage from Google or Apple.
“When I was in high school we used Snapchat every day. We had multiple conversations, selfies, videos taken in class, at events,” said one user on Reddit.
“We took a lot of selfies, and storage wasn’t a problem because we had Snapchat Memories.”
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A single photo Snap can be as small as one megabyte, but video Snaps longer than two minutes can easily exceed one hundred megabytes. So users who have been taking advantage of the free storage for years are likely to already be past the 5GB limit (one gigabyte is one thousand megabytes).
Snap said it will allow users to store content exceeding their allowance for 12 months, which presumably means it will be deleted after that point. Therefore, users with more than 5GB of Memories have a year from now to pay up, move their content elsewhere or lose it.
What to do if you don’t want to pay
So what can users do if they’re concerned about losing access to their Snapchat Memories? They could pay Snap for the storage, which is likely the easiest but most expensive solution. Or they could go to accounts.snapchat.com and request to download their data, which will include all of their Memories.
These could be stored in a safe place or go to another cloud storage system like iCloud or Google Photos. You may already be paying for this, or may be able to include it in a plan that covers the whole family.
Users looking to avoid hitting the 5GB limit in the future will need to be more judicious about what they save to Memories. The Snapchat app has an option to save content to the camera roll as you take it, which could again be backed up with a Google or Apple cloud plan. Both companies offer storage plans to cover a family of five, at $4.50 per month for 200GB or $15 per month for 2TB.
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