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For much more Five years ago, Google Photos has been one of the simplest tech recommendations. It’s feature-rich, ubiquitous, smart, easy to use, and most importantly, lets you store endless photos at “high quality” resolution – a polite way of saying “compressed” – without charging you a dime. Not anymore. The Google Photos gravy train will leave the station next summer, the company said earlier today. Once you go over 15 gigabytes, you will need to pay.
It is important to be clear on what exactly is changing here. All Google Accounts come with 15 GB of free storage, which you consume with Gmail messages and attachments, Google Drive files, and Google Photos files downloaded at their original size. All of this still applies. But you have so far had the option of letting Google resize your photos to a maximum of 16 megapixels when you upload them. These photos, as well as videos that reach 1080p resolution, did not count towards this 15 GB limit. As of June 1, 2021, new downloads of any size will be.
The good news: This means your existing “high quality” photos and videos won’t apply to the 15GB limit, nor those you upload until next May. In a blog post announcing the change, Google Photos vice president Shimrit Ben-Yair said 80% of users should stay under their quota for about three years before they hit this limit, although your mileage will vary. obviously. (High-quality photos downloaded from Pixel phones will remain exempt.)
“Since so many of you rely on Google Photos as the home of your lifelong memories, we think it’s important that it’s not just a great product, but that it is able to serve you over the long haul. term “, David Lieb, Google Photos Product Manager wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “To make sure that this is possible not only now, but in the long run, we decided to align the primary cost of providing the service (storing your content) with the primary value users enjoy (having universal registration). and useful with your life). “
Better to finally make people pay, in other words, than to cut the service altogether.
As former Dropbox Carousel users can attest, it’s hard to recover from the loss of a cloud storage provider. And Google has not shied away from killing beloved resources in the past. (RIP Google Reader, long live RSS.) And charging users directly for Google Photos also seems preferable to monetizing it through advertising, which remains irrelevant, according to Lieb.
Still, it will be an unwelcome transition for the many people who have come to rely solely on Google Photos as their memory repository. Once you’re done, extended storage plans start at $ 20 per year for 100 GB and go up to $ 50 per month for 10 terabytes. Google has introduced a tool to estimate how long your storage will last, based on your current download rate, and next year will start making it easier to find downloads you might want to delete: blurry or dark photos, for example, or long videos. .
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