Google Photos free high quality image storage going away Tuesday
Google lured us in with free unlimited high quality image storage and the ability to integrate into their ecosystem so you could search your photos based on location, people in the photo, time, items, etc.
With 28 billion photos uploaded a week, even Google can run out of space. Or if you’re on the conspiratorial fence, the project to get every human’s facial recognition done has been completed and the black ops funding has run dry. But mostly 28 billion photos a week is a couple billion too many.
What this means – everything existing high quality doesn’t count against whatever storage you have. Going forward it does. You’ll eventually need to purchase some storage or get rid of all the photos of your ex on Google Photos to make more room. You should have been doing that anyway.
Supposedly there is a storage management tool coming out in Photos that will help you. I see a couple of articles referencing that it’s out there for many users. As I actually write about Google products and could use it I am the last to get it. Supposedly it will help you locate low quality and garbage photos as well as give you other storage options.
If you’re needing to back up original quality photos, there’s really no change – you’ve been paying the data price. Amazon, if you’re a prime member, has unlimited original storage for however long that lasts. I can’t imagine this will be forever as people like me have 250+ gigs of photos.
Panic?
Probably not. They’re just not offering a free service any more. There are other services. You can pay a couple of bucks a month for storage if you want. Overall it’s a little sad it’s going away but wasn’t unexpected and doesn’t even earn my snarky comment “because you loved it, Google killed it.”
Also, everyone who hasn’t done it yet, make sure to get your 30TB worth of photos uploaded before June 1st.
