Sad news in the land of Google services today. Earlier they announced the end of a favorite feature: unlimited ‘high-quality’ photo storage via Google Photos. This will no longer be a thing on June 21st, 2021.
Its been a good 5 years but it looks like the freebie deal is coming to an end.
So Google will be implementing a new policy change to their online services as this will apply to Drive & Photos. Everything up to that date will be OK as anything after the 21st, will count towards your standard storage cap. What is that storage cap? If you didn’t know, Google has been giving everyone 15GB of online storage that’s spread across Gmail, Drive, & Photos. High-quality uploads to Photos previously was separate from that cap and that’s coming to an end.
Not sure if you’ve heard of Google One but that’s their online storage service. They recently just added a VPN service for higher tier subscribers. I can imagine that this is the reason for the recent change to direct users there for a paid option. Being a Google One subscriber, its super affordable as I pay $20 for the year for 100GB of data across Gmail, Drive, & Photos. However, Pixel owners won’t have to deal w/ this as they will retain unlimited ‘High Quality’ photo uploads to Photos.
So if the arrival of Google One cloud storage wasn’t an indicator of this happening, I’m not sure what else it could be. This would also tie into the recent rumors of new features being behind a paywall for Google Photos.
