Google will change its storage policies for free accounts.
June 1, 2021, all of your new photos will count against your free Google storage , Basically, if you’re on a free account and a semi-regular Google Photos user, get ready to pay up next year and subscribe to Google One.
Currently, every free Google Account comes with 15 GB of online storage
For all your Gmail, Drive and Photos needs. Email and the files you store in Drive already counted against those 15 GB, but come June 1, all Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms or Jamboard files will count against the free storage as well. Those tend to be small files, but what’s maybe most important here, virtually all of your Photos uploads will now count against those 15 GB as well.
That’s a bid deal because today, Google Photos lets you store unlimited images (and unlimited video, if it’s in HD) for free as long as they are under 16MP in resolution or you opt to have Google degrade the quality. Come June of 2021, any new photo or video uploaded in high quality, which currently wouldn’t count against your allocation, will count against those free 15 GB.
So All photos and documents uploaded before June 1st will not count against that 15GB cap, so you have plenty of time to decide whether to continue using Google Photos or switching to another cloud storage provider for your photos. Only photos uploaded after June 1st will begin counting against the cap.
To make this transition a bit easier, photos and videos uploaded in high quality before June 1, 2021 will not count toward the 15 GB of free storage. As usual, original quality images will continue to count against it, though. And if you own a Pixel device, even after June 1, you can still upload an unlimited number of high-quality images from those.
To let you see how long your current storage will last, Google will now show you personalized estimates, too, and come next June, the company will release a new free tool for Photos that lets you more easily manage your storage. It’ll also show you dark and blurry photos you may want to delete — but then, for a long time Google’s promise was you didn’t have to worry about storage (remember Google’s old Gmail motto? ‘Archive, don’t delete!’)
In addition to these storage updates, there’s a few additional changes worth knowing about. If your account is inactive in Gmail, Drive or Photos for more than two years, Google ‘may’ delete the content in that product. So if you use Gmail but don’t use Photos for two years because you use another service, Google may delete any old photos you had stored there. And if you stay over your storage limit for two years, Google “may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos.”
Cutting back a free and (in some cases) unlimited service is never a great move. Google argues that it needs to make these changes to “continue to provide everyone with a great storage experience and to keep pace with the growing demand.”
Google is also going to show a more useful “personalized estimate” of how much longer a storage tier will last in terms of time instead of gigabytes. It estimates each user’s average uploads over time to guess how much longer they’ll be able to use their current tier.
Why the change? One possibility is that it’s part of a larger push to get more people to sign up for Google One storage. The service now also includes a free VPN for Android at some of its higher tiers, and it seems as though many Google products are aligning with Google One. Google’s explanation in a brief interview is simpler: there is already a nearly unfathomable number of photos and videos uploaded to Google Photos, and the service needs to be sustainable. That’s the gist if you read between the lines of its blog post:
Today, more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. Since so many of you rely on Google Photos to store your memories, it’s important that it’s not just a great product, but also continues to meet your needs over the long haul. In order to welcome even more of your memories and build Google Photos for the future, we are changing our unlimited High quality storage policy.
source : Google.com
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