Google Photos Isn't Free Anymore

Google Photos Isn’t Free Anymore

Google has done it again! They’ve made their Photos App a paid app after they’ve made it clear before that it was free.

Starting June 1, 2021, any new photos and videos you upload will count toward the free 15 GB of storage that comes with every Google Account or the additional storage you’ve purchased as a Google One member. Your Google Account storage is shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos. This change also allows us to keep pace with the growing demand for storage. And, as always, we uphold our commitment to not use information in Google Photos for advertising purposes. We know this is a big shift and may come as a surprise, so we wanted to let you know well in advance and give you resources to make this easier.

Updating Google Photos’ storage policy to build for the future

This is typical, get someone addicted to a drug then ask them for money kind of a situation.

What Happened

Google has given a great product for so long, and then suddenly I get an email today morning and read that google decided to monetize its google photos product as of June 1, 2021.

How exactly they’ve monetized it?

Google had 2 types of backup options before:

• Original Quality This will be stored in your drive so you basically pay for the storage yourself.
• High Quality This is free unlimited storage given by google which compresses to 16mp and was pretty decent.

They basically made it like this now:

• Original / High Quality This will be stored in your drive so you basically pay for the storage yourself. Meaning if you store lots of videos, you’re gone. you can easily finish 100GB of storage (which is the first option they have) in a couple of months worth of high-quality videos.

What written above is just some facts that I’ve just listed for you and explained.

But what I think about this is that this will be quite a big problem for users because even if you buy storage on Gooogle One, you still need all the people around you to buy the same storage. ‘why’ you ask? because the nicest part about google photos is sharing tons of photos quickly and if the other side doesn’t have the storage then it’s just a product that is useful for some and not others.

It’s going to be just like when the Apple iPhone came out, people were exchanging photos using Bluetooth, and the iPhone didn’t support that feature.

I hope by the end of this small article you’ve decided to either switch and tell us if there’s a better service or signup to storage to unify this crisis!

Updating Google Photos’ storage policy to build for the future