The high quality of Google Photos may not be nearly the same as the original

When Google launched its Google Photos cloud storage, not to be confused with the app of the same name, it was hailed as the ultimate way to save space on your phone and preserve your digital memories almost forever. . It came with a rather generous offer of almost unlimited photo storage space, provided they were only downloaded in high quality. Nothing lasts forever, as they say, and it looks like Google is revising its previous statements in favor of taking more room towards a Google One subscription.

To be fair, Google has the right to change any policy or functionality it has, within reason and with prior warning, of course. He also didn’t make quantifiable claims for a reason, leaving some things open to interpretation and subject to change if necessary.

Half a decade ago, Google claimed that high-quality photos provided almost identical visual quality to their original quality. The goal at the time was to encourage users to compress their original photos in order to take advantage of Google Photo’s unlimited storage offer. However, from June 1 of this year, even high quality photos will count in your cloud storage and you will easily reach your 15GB quota without paying for an additional storage subscription.

Google has now reportedly sent out emails that, in effect, try to trick Google Photos users into uploading even larger original quality photos rather than high quality. The image above compares the difference between original (left) and high (right) qualities, clearly showing not nearly identical visual quality. Since high quality downloads will delete original quality photos on your phone by default, it means that you risk causing irreversible damage to your original photos.

On the one hand, it may not be representative of all high quality photos and some users may not even be able to tell the difference most of the time. On the flip side, these changes have left some people suspecting the Google background of causing people to now pay for more Google Drive storage after snagging them to Google Photos years ago.