Pixel Motion Photo test shows Top Shot triples photo storage costs

A week without Motion Photos

A writer at Android Police spent a week with Top Shot, the Pixel camera feature that saves a short video clip around each still image, switched off. The aim was to see whether the storage savings outweighed the risk of missing a fleeting moment. Her verdict, published on 14 November 2026, is that the space is better spent elsewhere.

The feature works by bundling a brief recording of the seconds before and after the shutter press into a single file with the photo. In the Google Photos app, swiping up on such an image plays the clip. Top Shot can run in Auto mode, which records only when the camera detects movement, or in On mode, which captures every shot.

How the test was run

The test used a Pixel 8 with 128GB of storage, the tightest budget among the writer's phones, making it a fair setting for judging storage habits. She took 100 photos with Top Shot enabled, then another 100 with it disabled, keeping subjects similar across both batches: people, a hand waving into frame, and moving scenes playing on YouTube.

Each batch was moved into its own folder so the Google Files app could show the total size and file count. One early problem appeared: a control folder held 226 files rather than 100, because the RAW setting had been left on, saving every shot twice as a JPEG and a much larger Digital Negative file. Those extra files were removed so the comparison stayed fair.

Neither Top Shot mode guarantees a usable capture. If the key moment falls outside the short recording window, or every frame is blurred, the feature cannot rescue the picture.

The storage numbers

The results were clear. One hundred standard photos came to 202MB, roughly 2MB per shot. The same number taken with Top Shot enabled filled 615MB, about 6.2MB per image, which is three times the storage.

Auto mode landed in between. One hundred photos in that mode totalled 285MB, around 3MB each, roughly 40% more than plain shots but less than half the cost of full On mode.

Switching the feature off saved 413MB per 100 photos. The writer also counted what was lost: about 16 moments out of each batch of 100, mostly due to blur or poor timing. The remaining pictures were deliberate and well framed.

Who should care

The writer notes that on a phone with 512GB, a few extra gigabytes of moving pictures would hardly register. On a 128GB Pixel, the maths is tighter, though she calculates it would take around 11,000 Motion Photos to fill her remaining 68GB, which would take months.

The real pressure comes from everything else competing for space: app updates, offline downloads, media from chat apps and system updates, all of which grow quietly. Media files are among the biggest consumers of storage, so keeping an eye on them avoids a forced clean-up when the phone warns that space is running low.

Alternatives and the verdict

Motion Photos are not the only way to salvage a poor shot on a Pixel. Best Take can replace blinking or turned-away faces in group pictures, and Photo Unblur in Google Photos sharpens shaky images. The writer says these tools have changed how she uses her phone day to day.

Her conclusion is that leaving Top Shot permanently enabled is not worth the space on a storage-constrained device. If she uses it at all, she would rely on Auto mode, which captures movement only when it matters and keeps the file sizes far closer to those of ordinary photos.