Google will soon stop giving away free space in Google Photos to store high-quality images. For the last five years, this has been a key feature of the service and has attracted many customers who, just in case, turned on sync and didn’t worry about the security of their images. In addition to photos, documents that were previously not within the free 15 GB limit will no longer be stored for free.
The company says that in this way it brings the level of services provided to you in line with industry standards. The company will also make policy changes to remove data from inactive accounts. She is in a hurry to assure us that such changes will not affect our convenience too much, however there are some doubts about it.
Contents
Free photo storage in Google Photos
Anyone who has used this feature will remember that Google offered unlimited space in its cloud storage if you chose “high quality” instead of “original quality” when uploading photos. The server processed the images to take up less space and did not count them in 15 GB of Regular free storage for all files.
The company policy change will take place on June 1, 2021 and will be linked to other changes in Google Drive. These include the rejection of free Google Workspace document and sheet storage. They will now also count as normal files and will reduce the free 15 GB. Changes that will affect the deletion of data from inactive accounts can also scare everyone, because the cleanup will take place if the user has not been active for two years. But if you are really active, then during this time you will definitely come to the store.
It makes me happy that all photos and documents uploaded before June 1, 2021 will not count towards the 15 GB limit. So you will have enough time to decide whether to continue using Google Photos or switch to another storage.
At the moment, in “high quality” (but not in the original), you can store not only photos, but also videos. As a result, everyone turned on sync with a smartphone and transferred tens of gigabytes of their family archive. This opportunity attracted a large number of customers to the service. Now the company seems to understand that the situation is getting out of control.
Why it is good to use Google Pixel
So far, the small indulgences remain only for Google Pixel smartphone users. They will still be able to upload an unlimited number of “high quality” images to the north. Note that before you could save as many photos and videos as you wanted in “original quality” for free.
In its defense, Google says that it already offers more free storage than many competitors, like Apple’s iCloud with its free 5GB. To reassure us, the company claims that 80 percent of Google Photos users won’t hit the 15GB limit for at least three years. Interestingly, users will receive not only information on how much disk space is left, but also how long this amount will last while maintaining their activity level.
In order not to miss the moment when the free space on the storage is coming to an end, a notification will be sent to you, and a convenient tool for finding and deleting unnecessary data will also be provided. This will make it much easier to clean up your storage, removing blurry images and screenshots, for example.
It may interest you: https://esdigitales.com/que-es-google-one-por-que-es-necesario-y-en-que-se-diferencia-de-apple-one/