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After five years of offering free and unlimited “high-quality” photo backups, Google Photos will begin charging for storage once more than 15 gigs on the account have been used. The change will take place on June 1, 2021 and will be accompanied by other Google Drive policy changes, such as counting Google Workspace documents and spreadsheets against the same cap. Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that have not been logged in for at least two years.
All photos and documents uploaded before June 1 do not Count on that 15GB limit, so you have plenty of time to decide whether to continue using Google Photos or to switch to another cloud storage provider for your photos. Only uploaded photos after June 1 will start counting against the cap.
Google already counts “original quality” photo downloads against a storage limit in Google Photos. However, removing an unlimited backup for “high quality” photos and videos (which are automatically compressed for more efficient storage) also takes away from one of the main selling points of the service. It was the photo service where you didn’t have to worry about the storage space you had.
By the way, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (non-original) photos for free after June 1 without those images counting towards their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original offering to get unlimited original quality, but it’s a little bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.
Google points out that it offers more free storage than others – you get 15GB instead of the paltry 5GB that Apple’s iCloud gives you – and it also claims that 80% of Google Photos users will not achieve it. not that 15 GB cap for at least three years.
The company will send alerts and warnings when you approach this cap. Google is also putting new storage management tools in Google Photos, including a tool that makes it easier to find and delete photos that you might not want anyway, like blurry pictures or screenshots.
Google will also show a more useful “custom estimate” of a storage tier’s lifetime in terms of time instead of gigabytes. It estimates each user’s average downloads over time to guess how long they will be able to use their current level.
Why this change? One possibility is that this is part of a larger effort to get more people to sign up for Google One storage. The service now also includes a free VPN for Android at some of its higher levels, and it looks like a lot of Google products are lining up with Google One. Google’s explanation in a brief interview is simpler: There are already an almost unfathomable number of photos and videos uploaded to Google Photos, and the service needs to be sustainable. That’s the gist if you read between the lines of his blog post:
Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. Since many of you rely on Google Photos for storing your memories, it’s important that it’s not only a great product, but that it continues to serve your long-term needs as well. In order to accommodate even more of your memories and to create Google Photos for the future, we are changing our high quality unlimited storage policy.
Google One’s prices don’t change. It starts at $ 1.99 / month for 100GB and has tiers ranging from 200GB ($ 2.99 / month), 2TB ($ 9.99 / month), and up to 30TB ($ 149.99 / month).
Along with photos, “Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard files” will also count towards storage limits. The reasoning is “to bring our policies more in line with industry standards,” Google says. (This puts an end to some very clever hacks like this that turned files into Google Docs via a binary converter tool.)
As for the inactive account policy, it seems pretty reasonable: if you haven’t touched your Google account for two years and you are not responding in any way to the multiple warning emails and notifications that Google sends you, the company may delete data from your Account. Here’s how Google explains it:
If you are inactive in one or more of these services for two years (24 months), Google may remove content from the product (s) for which you are inactive. […] Likewise, if you exceed your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content in Gmail, Drive, and Photos.
We will notify you several times before attempting to remove any content so that you have ample opportunity to take action. The easiest way to keep your account active is to regularly visit Gmail, Drive, or Photos on the web or mobile, while still being logged in and connected to the internet.
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