Google Photos Unlimited storage is no longer… unlimited

It’s a punch to the gut for some. I’ve been “promoting” Google Photos to my friends, simply because it can be used as a free, online photo backup storage. While the quality will not be of the original quality, they are still good enough to be viewed from your phone, shared to social media, and simply just to save whatever memories you have from your phone’s camera.

Whenever you need to show a long, forgotten photo to a friend, you can just open the Google Photos app and the memory would be there.

But Google’s announcement brings all that fun to an end. According to Google Blog, starting June 1, 2021, any new photos and videos you upload will count toward your free 15GB storage that comes with your Google Account (which is shared among Google Drive and Gmail as well).

Yeah, it sucks.

We’ve just had a 5-month old so like any new parents would do, we’ve been taking photos and videos of our son, non-stop. Rather than keeping all of the photos inside my phone, I’ve been backing them up to Google Photos (because it’s free and unlimited) and Microsoft One Drive (because I have 1.23TB of storage space and they are stored in the original quality).

So if you’ve been doing the same, or thinking of doing it, you may want to hold off because by June next year, all new uploaded photos and videos will count towards your quota. The good news is that you can still upload all the photos and videos you want to Google Photos until then and they will not count towards your quota at the end.

However if you have Google Pixel phone (Pixel 1 – 5), any photos and videos uploaded from your phone will not count towards the quota, even after 1 June 2021. Pixel phones are very good (make sure to check our coverage on Google Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a with 5G, and Pixel 5).

This is clearly a move to encourage you to subscribe monthly to Google One. Or probably there are many people abusing the free, unlimited storage. Or it could be that these unlimited storage was made to entice people to try them out, and now people are getting hard to part with it after all these years.

One thing for sure, you either have to grab that Google One subscription next year, or move your memories somewhere else.

Share via
Copy link